


Parasite

by beekeepercain



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angelic Grace, Angelic Possession, Angels, Children, Corpse Desecration, Domestic, Established Relationship, Expanded lore, Fluff and Angst, Grace Pregnancy, Graphic Description of Corpses, Men of Letters, Men of Letters Bunker, Multi, Necromancy, Nephilim, Obsession, Occult, Parenthood, Plot Driven, Pregnancy, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-18 00:58:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 68,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1409140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beekeepercain/pseuds/beekeepercain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"You're really good with kids."</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Sam had that expecting look about him. Dean tried to avoid it.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>"Have you ever -"</i>
</p><p>  <i>"No," Dean said bluntly.</i><br/><i>Sam kept staring, and eventually Dean had to look at him.</i><br/><i>"I can't, okay?"</i></p><p>But hell if he didn't want to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Okay. Okay, I really don't know where I went wrong with my life, but here we stand. For half a year or so, I had this challenge in my mind: this is Supernatural. Anything is plausible. There has to be a way to make mpreg plausible. And I guess there was some obscure part of me that really wanted to write an mpreg fic. **This isn't that.** I mean, it kind of is, but it completely is not. **There's no male pregnancy in here at all.** There's.... something else, something profoundly more disturbing, and I suggest you **read the tags before proceeding. I'm serious.** There are parts in this fic that are _completely fucked up_ and I'm not going to be held responsible for projectile vomiting or mental trauma because I fucking told you so, okay?
> 
> But I got my domestic fic, and let me just say that I love it. Best part: it's actually finished.
> 
> Approximate final word count is 70 000 words, but as always, it's subject to change as I do the final proofing at the same time as I publish a chapter.

* * *

 

It started innocently, like any daydream. Sam got a girl - they dated for a year, got engaged once she had been fully initiated to the Men of Letters and married the following year with the Letters gathered to witness and, of course, for the party that everyone had been looking forwards to. Dean followed the development a little jealous (how else?) but he was happy for Sam, happy that he had a girl, happy that the girl knew all his dirty little secrets (like the apocalypse, for one), happy the girl had still chosen him - chosen to stay. Castiel, on the other hand, remained seemingly unaffected by the adjustments in their family picture. After each long night he'd spent sitting by the younger's side, or by killing time doing "something useful" as he called studying and staying up late with the temporary residents of the bunker whomever they may at the time have been, Castiel still greeted Dean with a smile and a casual _good morning_ or _how did you sleep?_ Dean, as always, was as if glued to him most the time. They hardly ever separated, as unlike Sam who treasured his personal space and private time and had never been very fond of Dean's unfortunate clinginess, Castiel flourished when he always had company. When Dean wasn't following him, he followed Dean; he'd excused it as natural for his species, so Dean had started referring to the whole thing as pack behaviour.  
  
The joke spread - soon Charlie and Kevin were in on it.  
 _'Are you experiencing separation anxiety? Poor little thing,'_ when Castiel was out doing whatever it was that he as a half-retired angel of the Lord still had to do and Dean kept pacing restlessly through the rooms trying to replace the emptiness inside.  
 _'Did you lose your alpha mate?'_ when Dean had disappeared to do whatever it was that wasn't important enough to drag Castiel along and the angel stood still staring at something of no particular interest for hours on end.  
They both had that crooked, lost little smile on their lips in response. That was the kind of a relationship they had, rarely apart and when so, however fleetingly, always longing for reunion.  
Dean's unvoiced yet not so secret dream was for that to be their forever. When they lay together in bed after the hunter had turned off the lights but found himself not quite ready for sleep, he sometimes spoke of it to the angel.

"Cas?"  
The other would stay quiet but often, as if instinctively knowing what the subject would be, joined their fingers together, grasping Dean's hand in his reassuringly as if to say; _I'm here. I'm listening.  
_ "You think that could be us? You know."

"I don't see why not."  
But neither proposed.  
It was that little thing that didn't seem at all logical or reasonable - what was a ring where they were already bound soul to grace and grace to soul, with markings upon their eternal forms? What was a priest's blessing in the name of the Lord, when God was gone and Castiel, an _angel_ , had chosen Dean of his own free will?

The domestic little dream remained a dream. It was good that way. It had its long fingers, the shadows that sometimes slipped into Dean's consciousness, but _he_ was good this way. Castiel's love for him was unyielding and profound, and he felt exactly the same; the only thing that could possibly separate them was a blade tearing the angel from life, and Dean was quite confident that the way things were now, it was unlikely enough. Should he fall himself, Heaven's gates were all but open to the seraph as well, and Castiel could follow him as easily as he could follow Dean to the next room. Forever sounded like it was already promised to them this way - life, for once, bore fruit instead of falling apart at the seams.

The complication to the harmless daydream came in the form of a swelling belly, a small round bump pushing against the fabric of Jennifer's bright, loose tunic, and the blissfull, absent aura that Sam started wearing for comfort, getting lost in his thoughts with that stupid smile on him.  
The heavy burden came easy in the simplest of words, delivered light and to innocently excited ears ( _"The test came out positive. She's pregnant. Dean, I'm going to be a dad. Can you imagine? I - I can't. It's - I...", "Sam - that's - that's... Damn. Does that mean I'm gonna be an uncle?_ Damn. _Wow. Way to go, man. Congrats!"_ ), and Dean had no idea how the news would take root in him. How they spawned a doubt - a realisation.

That could never be them.


	2. Secrets

* * *

 

**Spring**

Snow was melting. It trickled down the road and into the ditch, and Dean's boot was slowly sinking in the muddy, sloshy ground. He shivered as the warmth of the car faded from him, but the weather wasn't cold - not even the breeze felt cool. Sun shone bright from inbetween the torn light grey clouds sliding sluggishly across the deep blue springtime skies, and birds were chirping everywhere, couples and packs of them often charging through the air, filling it with the sharp dry sounds of their wings. Castiel stood by Dean, eyes tracing the horizon, face lifted towards the skies: he seemed concentrated and keen as he examined the waking of the world. Cars passed them occasionally, sending dirt flying at the already mud-stained Impala.

"What's so interesting?" Dean asked him cheerfully, pulling his boot out of the ground with a loud wet sound.  
It left behind yet another depression that slowly filled with water and collapsed.

"Spring is very beautiful. It's like witnessing the creation again, except that it's very fast, very temporary. Everything... comes to life again."

"Dude, is that a chaste way of saying that pretty much everything around us is trying to get laid?"

"Perhaps."  
Castiel side-eyed the younger before returning full concentration upon nature again.

Dean grinned.  
"Man," he muttered, stretching - subconsciously his eyes were drawn to the large bruise on his arm and he grimaced, "I need coffee. Strong, black... large."  
His fingers turned to tap gently along the swollen skin, looking for fractures in his bones although he knew he'd hurt more if there were any.  
"Hot."

"Is there a gas stop nearby?"

"Nah, don't think so. But there's a small town an hour from here before we join up with the highway, so hopefully..."  
Dean's voice fell apart as his mind drifted to that town and the coffee it contained. Then, after a small pause, he chuckled and cleared his throat, pushing his body up from where it had leaned to the car.  
"Let's get going, angel."

Castiel nodded. His way back to the car was very short - Dean had been leaning onto the door of the passenger's side, so that where he had to cross around the car, Castiel could just step in. The old Impala creaked welcomingly as they settled inside.  
"Doesn't it make you feel good?" the older asked as Dean started the engine and got them back on the road.

"What now?"

"Spring."

Dean huffed. He allowed his muddy boot to sink over the pedal until they were almost flying on the road, fast and steady and smooth.  
"I haven't thought about that," he replied after a moment, "and I really don't know."

"It makes me feel more alive," Castiel told him.

"Well, good for you."

 

* * *

 

They were between hunts; one behind them, another waiting ahead somewhere beyond Lebanon, Kansas. Lebanon still seemed sleepy - the countryside that surrounded it was wrapped in a veil of dark grey, sometimes showered with cold rains from the heavy-hanging clouds. The bunker, or _home_ as Dean liked to think of it as, yet remained warm and still and like a bear's nest in the winter. Jennifer had gotten big; she greeted them in the study, hands over a thick dusty book, fingers resting along the lines of text.  
"Got coffee?" Dean asked her the first thing.

She nodded.  
"Sam just made some after your call. It should be ready by now. Dinner's in the oven, don't snack on anything."

Castiel took a seat by the table near her. He'd forgotten to take off his coat, so before heading off, Dean decided he could as well remind him. Gently, he slid his fingers under the soft fabric and onto Castiel's relaxed shoulders, his touch anything but platonic, and he felt the angel shiver as the overcoat fell down his shoulders and into Dean's grasp.  
"You don't even try, do you?" the younger poked at him challengingly.

Castiel merely grunted.  
  
"Who else is in?" Dean asked Jennifer as he hung the coat over the back of the chair.

"Just me and Sam now. Kevin's due for later tonight; he spent a couple days looking after his mother."

"How's Queen Tran?"

Jennifer lowered her gaze and shut the book, apparently declaring her chances of concentrating on it again too small to count on. Then she sighed and laid a hand over her pregnant belly, rubbing at it slowly as she considered her next words.  
"Better," she finally spoke, "Kevin said he might bring her in here soon. Get her initiated, perhaps."

"That good? Wow," Dean replied in a tone of surprise and respect, raising his brows. "Good news for once."

Jennifer nodded. Then she sighed again and smiled that warm, introverted smile that spoke of her concentrating on the life growing inside her.  
"Could you find Sam for me and tell him not to bother me if I go nap for a couple hours? I'm tired all the time now. It's getting ridiculous. I'm not feeling I'm much good for the cause," she chuckled wornly.

Dean felt a crooked smile on him.  
"Don't worry about it, Jen."  
He grabbed Castiel's shoulder promptingly.  
"Come, Cas - I want coffee and Sam's probably poking around the Archive again."

Castiel nodded and stood up.  
"I'll go find Sam. Don't drink all the coffee."

"I might," Dean laughed, hand sliding off of the older's shirt, "Come find me when you've found him."

 

* * *

 

When no one was there to catch him in the act, Dean took his time looking at her. Jennifer got up to serve the dinner: Castiel and Sam were in the study, looking into the next case. Dean was still drinking coffee, and he'd chosen to do it in the kitchen, so that when his brother's wife appeared in there with her hair sticking in every direction and with the pillow's image printed upon her left cheek, Dean was the only one in there with her.  
She nodded at him in greeting, and he smirked and waved relaxedly in return; when she turned to her task, his eyes stayed upon her.  
  
It wasn't curiosity anymore. It was warm, melancholic longing, kind jealousy, a natural wish to have what she had, what Sam had, for what they shared. He'd always been like that - always wanted to one day be the guy hearing the magical words, the new father holding his firstborn, the grumpy dude cleaning up the mess left behind by his toddler. Of course, it hadn't ever been likely, but he hadn't stopped dreaming until after Lisa; leaving Ben had probably been the most painful thing he'd ever done to himself. Sometimes, the memory still haunted him, but at least it wasn't haunting them. Even after all those years, it still seemed to him that he'd made the best choice. And he wasn't unhappy now, he reminded himself as a flash of pain made home inside his chest. He just wasn't like them.

He'd always hoped Sam would grow to have a family, too. He'd believed in that dream more than he'd believed in the stupid dream of his own, yet over time, it had seemed more and more unlikely for them both. Yet apparently miracles did happen: one was happening now before his eyes, slowly and as unexpectedly as everything that was normal to most other people always came to them. And this miracle of life had finally returned his own hope to him. Now more than ever, the dream's hopelessness had grown much past the faith it had given him - he ran around in circles in his own thoughts, chasing his tail. Now everything was good, so - but _Castiel_. It wasn't unusual for same-sex couples to adopt - and what, bring an innocent, already twice damned kid into _this_ life?

How was bringing a biological one any better?

Oh, but wait. He wouldn't be able to adopt anyway. Legally, he did not exist. Neither did his partner.

So what? They could smuggle a kid.

The whole thing made his head ache and prompted a thin layer of tears of frustration upon his lower lid, burning until he turned down his head and blinked.  
The old coffee tasted bitter now.

"Could you help me carry everything in the study?"  
Jennifer still sounded tired, but her voice was as friendly and apologetic as ever. She was such a perfect woman for Sam: productive and independent with a proper understanding of her worth, but not too proud to ask for help when she needed it - and a perfect shot, too. Apparently that had been part of the criteria. Sam wasn't taking any chances.

"Sure," Dean replied, attempting a smile.  
Jen didn't seem to notice the ache behind it, and Dean was happy for that. He emptied his cup in a single sip and stood up.

Why was nothing ever simple for him?  
Why was his base nature against everything that fate had laid out in front of him?  
When all the big battles were already fought, was it really necessary for him to create yet another one?  
Was his life _really_ that dull?

 

* * *

 

"Cas."  
Dean's voice came out weaker than he'd intended. He moved closer to the angel's naked, warm form and pressed against him in a pained manner that prompted the older to instinctively wrap his arms around him again, much tighter than he'd done before.  
Making love hadn't dulled the ache. It seemed now that whenever it came, it lasted longer and fewer and fewer things had any effect on him. He couldn't even drink anymore. It did nothing to stop the pain.  
"Cas, we need to talk."

"Aren't we?" Castiel asked in turn, the joke a gentle attempt to break the strain in Dean.  
Dean didn't know if it did, but he let out a breathless, strained chuckle regardless.

He closed his eyes to escape the moment, trying to find an alternative. There wasn't one, but he was so bad at talking.  
He tried and tried but there was no way to start. As if to remind him just how connected they were, Castiel found the words for him, paving the way for his thoughts.

"It's about Jennifer, isn't it?" he asked calmly, near restfully.

 _Damn your zen,_ Dean found himself thinking wornly, _How do you manage it?_

"I want what they have, Cas."  
He swallowed.  
"I know it sounds selfish. I know I'm _being_ selfish. You can blame the spring or whatever you want, but I feel - I feel so empty lately. It's like... this gnawing feeling inside of me, eating away until I'm hollow. And I don't want to be hollow, Cas. I don't know what the hell is going on with me."

Castiel breathed ever as calmly, but for a moment, he didn't speak. That wasn't unusual when they were talking serious, and frankly, Dean was asking him to understand humanity now, his most basic human desires. That wasn't exactly easy for Cas. He still couldn't relate as well as he would have wanted.

"You're stable," the angel said then.

Dean raised his eyes to him and found him looking back thoughtfully.  
"What?"

"You feel safe and secure. Stable."

"Yeah, and?"

"It's basic biology. Your needs are met, those closest to you are moving onto a new phase in their lives. You feel that you're ready, too. It kicks off the instinct."

"I'm not some fucking animal, Cas."

"Well," the angel breathed out in the heavy way he did when Dean was being unreasonable, "in this case, you are."

Dean expected him to continue with the obvious - it seemed too much so for him to not say it.  
 _I'm male, Dean, I can't give you a child.  
_ Or, hell; _I'm an angel, Dean._  
Cut short the chase and get to the end of it, tell him it wasn't going to happen. Instead, he said nothing, and the silence was suspicious.

"What? What are you _not_ saying, Cas? Because if I'm honest with you, that doesn't really make me feel any better. Is it going to pass? Am I going to grow old and bitter and too gay to reproduce, because if that's the case, I'm going to start now."

Castiel sighed.  
"I don't know, Dean," he said slowly like Dean was an idiot, "I don't know if it's going to pass. Maybe it will. Maybe it'll be enough for you to look after your brother's child. Maybe it won't."

"Why does it feel so - so painful? To think that I'd... I just... I want it, Cas. I want it real bad. It's like... what I am isn't enough. That I'm still not whole. That I need that, that it's... that I... I want to be a dad, Cas. I've always wanted. Always. And... I don't know if I can take it. Watch Sam be and know that I... I don't know what I'm expecting - what could you possibly do about it. I just can't hold it inside anymore. It's like getting stabbed in slow-mo."

The silence kept growing more and more suspicious. It wasn't the lack of words - it was the tenseness of the angel next to Dean, the way he forgot to breathe, the electricity of near-spoken secrets between them. What was he holding back? Was he, in the first place, or did Dean just want him to be? And if, then what did he expect him to tell him? That as an angel, he of course could just possess someone else - someone female - and make her their incubator. Yeah, that sounded like just the thing that Dean needed, and just like something Cas would say.  
Or not. Ever. Not in a million years to both.

No more of the topic was spoken that night. The week after, Jennifer gave birth to a healthy and strong, screaming and kicking chubby baby boy: a dark-haired Winchester with her eyes, Sam's nose and Dean's lips. For a while, his Sam-like eyes had the exact colour of Castiel's, and for a while, all of this was enough to push back the agony that had carved a hole around Dean's heart.  
Much like any other chronic pain however, it didn't stem from a place that could be healed with substitutes, and eventually it came back, and as was common for any other chronic pain, it came back worse.

 

* * *

 

**Summer**

Mrs. Tran was an unique lady. When she stepped out of the Impala, soon followed by Sam and shortly preceded by her rather nervous-looking son, she looked like she was simultaneously ready to set things ablaze and to hug the life out of the ones she'd not yet seen again. She marched to Dean and nearly crushed him with her weightless arms, then stopped and slapped him on the face so that he yelped in pain - Castiel took a step forwards, only to have his ready-to-defend palm grabbed and shaken vigorously. Dean had tears in his eyes but couldn't deny deserving the pain: after all, he'd been the one who'd told Kevin she was as good as dead, and then, well, that was just the beginning of it.  
If he'd gotten what he'd _really_ deserved, there would be a vendetta on him and all his friends for what he'd done to the Trans. Instead, she did her best to forgive, and as always, her love and devotion came first before anger.

As they headed indoors, led by Jennifer carrying the sleepy little giant wrapped in his ivory blanket and followed closely by the very excited Mrs. Tran, Dean was choking on air.  
Castiel's hand joined his in silence and then soon parted to press against the small of his back, bringing him close against the angel's side. Today, Castiel looked human; he had a worn Zeppelin shirt of Dean's on him and a pair of jeans that he'd picked out of a sales bin once that hung low on his hips and revealed his pair of bare feet as they descended the stairs back to the bunker. His scent remained unchanged and his presence made Dean feel like a wounded dove being sheltered by a large pair of hands more than capable of crushing him yet still choosing to keep him safe instead. He continued to feel that way for the best part of the day, and although he laughed more than he could remember having for a long while, his guilt was mixing in to the pushed-back, shameful desires and making him more uncomfortable by the minute.

There was a lot of commotion in the bunker during the next few days: Mrs. Tran was a woman of action and wanted a room for her "secret hobbies", as she'd started referring to her duties as a novice Woman of Letters, yet she also wanted to rent a place of her own from some city nearby, and Jennifer was in and out of the place with her as they looked for housing available in the surrounding areas. She seemed to love the bunker but not as a home; rather, it was a clubhouse for her, a place where her knitting group of death and destruction met once or twice a week. She applied for light jobs everywhere, as if working one career on the dark side of the moon wasn't enough for her.

Kevin cheered up from her presence, but he also immatured. It was so easy for him to be more a kid again when his mother was there to fuss over him, and the rest allowed him that. He'd accepted his life, the way it would remain, and he deserved the break when he could get it. This was a prime time. To make it better, it was a reward for his dedication in helping his mother recover. He had her back, stronger and bursting with her usual energy. That was the best outcome any of them could have hoped for.

Dean, as much as he wanted to just slink back to his little dungeon to sulk and pity himself, had his hands full too. He helped Sam with his baby boy (named Henry after their grandfather; a Man of Letters himself and the very person who'd introduced them to the order in the first place) and kept the bunker standing - all the while keeping an eye out for any case that could get him out of there for a while, somewhere far where the air was fresher or at least smelled of blood. Castiel disappeared; it was probably because of the social pressure the visitation burdened him with, but also because Heaven remained a hot mess that more often than not required a firm hand to hold it together. As it happened, Castiel was often the only firm hand not all too willing to break spines to keep order.  
For the first time Dean barely noticed, but sleep without the male by his side was a pain. He prayed: it was the first and the last thing he did each day.

_Cas, man, I know you're probably busy. The bed's real big without you so I'm just gonna take up all that space and think of you with my fingers running down those tracks on my body that you wish you'd be licking right now. Amen._

_Cas, good morning. Where are you? Come home. I keep making too much coffee when you're not drinking half of it._

_Cas, it's cold down here. Kevin's done nothing the whole day but played PS. I joined. Don't hate. I miss you. Come back soon._

_Cas? I stepped out of the bed wrong again. I think I broke my ankle. Come heal it, pretty please?_

_Castiel. You have a delicious round ass and sweet, sweet legs. I wish I was between them. You can listen to me wish real loud if you want to. A-men._

_Cas, my goddamn ankle is actually swollen. I'm bandaging it as I'm praying. I found a feather from your side again, did you fucking stalk me while I slept? I don't believe you when you say you don't molt, because you do. The pillows have white feathers. These are black. What colour yours are? Do you even have feathers? I'm just guessing, but I imagine them black._

_Cas, fucking hell, I'm hurting. Come home soon. Please, Cas. Please. I need you. I need you so bad. I want to carve my insides out to stop this. I can't think of anything else anymore. It's just that. I can't watch them happy, Cas. It's killing me. I don't want to be so bitter. I don't want to hurt. I just need someone to hold me. I'm gonna get drunk now. To fall asleep. To... not think._

 

* * *

 

It wasn't supposed to be a big thing, baby fever. It was spoken of very lightly and it was never associated with men; it was a _girl thing_. But then Sam brought it up.  
"I don't know what the hell got into me, Dean," he said in a disbelieving voice, eyes on the TV.

"Huh?" Dean responded, distracted by the big explosions and the slippery surface of his cold bottle of beer.

"When we dropped protection. When - uh - when I asked Jen to drop it."

That got his attention. Slowly Dean turned his face towards Sam and blinked.  
"Wait, what?"

He'd always thought the boy was an accident. Of course it had been an accident, the whole thing, right? Then it dawned to him: holy crap, the two of them were married. Married people actually planned pregnancies. Holy crap. The kid was wanted. They'd made a damn decision on him. They'd _dropped protection_. Kicked the pill. Ditched the rubber. Shot...  
... no, he didn't want to think about that anymore. Judging by the ugly images in his head and the expression Sam wore, he'd already gone much too far.  
He swallowed the grimace thickly and returned to the present day.  
"Why?"  
That seemed to be the only logical question offered to him at this point of the conversation.

Sam shrugged. He sipped his beer and smiled tiredly.  
"I felt like it was the right thing to do. Like I needed that - a family. It's not exactly the normal life I hoped for - and damn, it's hard, too - but I'm happy, Dean. I just... I thought I'd never..."

"Man," Dean muttered.  
He took a long gulp out of his beer and swallowed it slow.  
"Maybe you got possessed. You know. Again."

Sam laughed.  
"Yeah," he sighed, "it sure felt like that. I mean - at first it was this stupid idea I had. And then it wasn't anymore."

Dean felt like he had something solid and awful stuck in his throat and only nodded in response. They both kept staring at the movie, both blind and visioning other kinds of worlds, and by the end of the silence, the subject was still the same.  
"You've been a big help, Dean."

"Eh."

"No, really. I mean - you're really good with kids."  
Sam had that expecting look about him. Dean tried to avoid it.  
"Have you ever -"

"No," Dean said bluntly.  
Sam kept staring, and eventually Dean had to look at him.  
"I can't, okay?"


	3. Breaking

* * *

 

The angel was keeping secrets. It wasn't just a feeling. It was a factual... fact.  
Dean stared at him, a deed easily accomplished as Cas was pinned underneath him. Their bodies were kept apart by two layers of clothing and their souls by a distance that could have bridged the Atlantic ocean twice.

"What are you not telling me?"

"There's a way, Dean."

"What?"  
For some stupid reason, Dean's mind translated the word "way" as a synonym for the word _path_ or _road_ , and for a fleeting moment, he was confused. Then, when the appropriate connection was made, he grew cold and stopped breathing.  
Castiel watched him and looked dead serious and tense like he'd last been when confronted about the most recent potential apocalypse. It was a strange thing to see in him, even if seriousness and tension was something akin to his basic nature and therefore the least surprising turn of events for Dean to witness.

Finally, he had to breathe again. As if a spell had broken, Castiel looked away from him and at the ceiling above, swallowed and pressed his palm against Dean's side. Dean fell off from on top of him, landing softly next to him on the mattress instead. He sought for an eye contact that he hesitantly was granted.

"There's... a way. But it's not a good way. I only tell you because - because I feel like I'm lying to you if I keep it further."

They kissed. Dean wasn't sure why he'd started it, but his heart was racing too hard for his brain to make sense of anything in the overload of oxygen flooding in. It wasn't a comforting kiss or a scared kiss - it was a confused kiss in which neither of them knew why it was happening or if it should go on through another motion. When it broke, they were as if stunned, breathing into one another's mouth.  
Dean stared at Castiel - Castiel tried to look away seeming a little scared.

"Cas. Tell me. Please."

The angel nodded slowly and rigidly.  
"You know of nephilim," he said.

It wasn't a question, so Dean didn't answer. Of course he knew of nephilim. He hadn't made the acquintance of any - probably because Castiel had personally slaughtered the last remaining one - but the lore was familiar enough to him.  
Nephilim were the offspring of angels and humans - referred to as giantsin the scriptures, they had many powers that were native to angels, but a mind that was a mixture and the capability to hide their true non-human forms from those around them, including most angels. They were violent and dangerous, incapable of emotion, walking blasphemy like so many other things Dean had made close contact to - pure and plain book examples of monsters.  
Yet, there was something he'd never before really given thought to.

Nephilim were _the offspring of angels and humans_.

Slowly, Dean raised his head. This certainly did not sound like the kind of a solution he was looking for, and he swallowed. He didn't know what to ask and feared that he'd need to come up with something idiotic just to get Castiel to talk, but eventually, the angel closed his eyes and pushed the rest of the sentence out like it was a spear that he had to birth through his mouth.  
"Do you know how nephilim are born?"

Dean could hear his own heartbeat.  
"No," he replied truthfully, "I mean - I guess they're just, uh, you know, like any other flavour of monsters that breed."

"Not quite."  
Castiel hadn't yet ceased to look like speaking caused him physical pain. Dean brought a hand to stroke his face and hair gently, trying to ease him into giving him the answers he needed so bad, but mostly just to convince him it was alright to speak to begin with.  
"Angels," the older continued after a moment, now looking away entirely, "do not breed. We are not physically capable of breeding, as there is no genetic information in us, no... need to produce offspring. We are immortal, parts of a whole that was once perfect; we are not like humans, nor are we like any other type of animal. We are... wavelengths, essence of creation, non-physical - non-sexual."

He glanced at Dean, clearly expecting him to make a tasteless joke about sexuality, but the hunter was too busy being serious to try and lighten the mood by making references to the angel's libido, although clearly Castiel knew him very well, as the joke had certainly passed his mind.

"In a situation where an angel in a male vessel impregnates a human female, the child is human, born of the seed of the vessel and the egg of the woman. The angel has nothing to do with the child, and the child will be perfectly normal. In the reverse situation, a pregnancy cannot occur, as the physical changes are too radical for a vessel to go through without the grace bringing them under control. In other words, an angel would subconsciously - willing or not - regard the pregnancy as damage and attempt to recover."

"Reset to factory settings?"

Castiel smiled.  
"Yes."

Dean grimaced in response.

"Even if the unlikely came to pass, the resulting child would still be completely human. Even if two angels managed to achieve a pregnancy together while envesseled, the child would be completely human."

"Screwed for life, though."

"More than likely."

"On a second thought, I'm really glad you guys don't breed," Dean muttered.  
He laid his head down to rest on his arm and examined Castiel: the other had relaxed, but the subject was clearly heading out of his comfort zone again now that biology was done and over with. The smile on the angel had faded slowly into a sigh as he constructed the next sentence in his mind.

"Nephilim are not like other monsters. A nephil is a parasite, Dean, one created with the sole intent of bringing such a creature to life. They do not start out that way. They start out as injuries."

Dean felt his brows knitting closer, and Castiel looked at him seeming so tired and defeated it pained the younger to even allow him to continue. Yet, even from a completely unbiased point of view, he needed to hear the rest. This was information he was certain no one had ever written down, or if had, the evidence had been most swiftly destroyed. A part of him was expecting the wrath of God to land on them from above, but God was silent as always, completely uninterested in and indifferent to the misadventures of his creation.

"When a human's soul touches an angel's grace directly, the grace is corrupt by the foreign energy. Humans and angels do not mix. An example of a situation where something like that has happened is when I brought you out of Hell, Dean; I took a hold of you with all I was to keep you from being torn from me, and then you reached out for me, and you did the same - you gripped me as tightly as I gripped you, and your soul burned a mark into me like the one I left on you. For you, it was just like a burn, and it manifested upon your physical form. Your soul regenerated and when I healed you again, the mark was gone. Something similar happened to me as well, even though I do not have such a form to show it in. It did not translate to my vessel, as my vessel doesn't mirror my essence as your flesh mirrors yours. Instead, the part of a grace that is corrupted is, in the lack for a better word, amputated. It's a slow and painful process much akin to any other damage in an angel's grace - being wounded by an angel blade takes time to recover from, and so is the case with corruption."

For some reason, Dean had no idea where all this was heading to. He felt intrigued by the fact that he'd actually managed to punch this son of a bitch back on the way up - even if it had probably not gone all too much like that and had most likely included a lot of sobbing ugly into Castiel's chest and literally holding on for dear life, the thought was a victory he enjoyed knowing he'd had. He would have given a lot to punch Cas back in the day. He had even attempted to do just that, but it hadn't ended all too well for his fist.  
On the other hand, the knowledge did make him feel a little uneasy, too.

"So... how does that all tie up?"

The angel shivered visibly. He swallowed and closed his eyes, frowning, and took a breath before continuing.

"The creation of a nephil requires the capture of the corrupt grace. It can be cut out like any grace, and it will behave like one, although it is vastly weaker than a full angel's grace is. I do not know who was the first one who thought to attempt... to create with something like that. I only know that the angel responsible has been imprisoned for all eternity. It could even have been Lucifer himself, many attribute the invention of this to him directly as corrupting humanity was a favourite way for him to pass time - it would have to be one that thinks as little of you, views you as just as worthless, as Lucifer, so in the end it doesn't matter if it was him or if it was somebody else. The result of their experiment was the first nephil."

"And the steps?"

"First," Castiel continued, and Dean felt nearly as intimidated as he seemed to be now, "the grace of an angel has to come in touch with the soul of a human. There are rituals that can forcefully bare a soul, and the angel's guard has to be broken either through a weakness or by strain that forces all of their strength away from protecting the essence itself - like breaking through a shield."

Dean's fingers got tangled in his hair and they were both quiet for a moment as he undid the knot.

"Then, the injury will... it's like a festering wound. The infection spreads and the pure essence fights it, eventually resulting in rejection of the corrupt part of the grace."

"That sounds like it could kill y-... the angel."

Castiel shook his head.  
"Grace is not like flesh," he said, "and corruption is not quite like a blood poisoning. Of course, in case of severe and wide-spread corruption the angel will be vulnerable and easy to kill, even through other means than by holy fire and blades. Some rituals and powerful magic can pierce through a weakened angel's grace and kill them - a badly wounded angel will die when banished with a sigil, for example. Their essence will literally break apart. But as rare as corruption is, it occurs relatively often when you live as long as I have lived, and I have never heard of a single angel dying directly because of that alone. It's considered... an inconvenience."

Dean couldn't help snorting. One thing he'd accepted in his life so far was that he'd never really _get_ angels. On top of being douches, they continuously shrugged off fatal injuries and apparently gangrene, too.  
"So more like a broken leg?" he asked, still somewhat amused.

Castiel didn't seem to get what was so funny about what he'd said, but nodded regardless.  
"Yes."

"And... then?"

"Once the corrupt essence is captured, it remains what it is, a broken piece. But given a vessel - a vessel with enough potential - it will... develop and grow."

Dean cleared his throat, turning a little more comfortably where he was resting.  
"Sounds like this is where it gets ugly."

He saw the answer on the angel's features; it flashed as a shadow across his eyes, then melted into him like someone had set something in front of the light exactly where it shone upon him.  
"To grow, a nephil requires a young child's body - the younger, the more essence is left unused, and the less the native soul resists. Like a cuckoo, the nephil will grow stronger much faster than the human ever could, and because it is part human, it does not simply possess the body. It forces the weaker soul out - in essence, it kills the child, and takes over the flesh."

Somehow, the room had grown cold now. Dean felt like his chest was being constricted by something too heavy to allow him his breath, and when he reached for the blanket trapped under their feet, his hands were cold. Castiel allowed him to pull the covers over them both and let out a small, low grunt as Dean pushed his hand back in his thick hair. Now it was more for his own comfort than Castiel's: whatever he'd expected, this hadn't been it.

"You expect me to sleep after hearing this? Goddamnit."

The angel let out a soft huff and wrapped his arm around Dean. Dean allowed him to pull him close and stayed there against the older's firm, warm body, feeling tension shed from him although the cold, uncomfortable feeling remained.

 

* * *

 

In mid-June, the weather took a nasty turn from nice and warm to unbearably, unforgivingly hot. The Impala stayed on the road with as many holes in it as possible to let air in, but Dean still felt like he was breathing wet sheets with the occasional high-velocity fly trapped within. They didn't have a choice: three hunters had gone missing investigating the case where five children had disappeared from a small town. That was a national-scale catastrophe with Amber Alert and the actual FBI tangled in the mix, something no sane hunter was going to mess with, so the insane ones had to take the scene for theirs. As far as was known, Dean and Sam were by a long shot the craziest. Castiel tagged along as their own personal little nuclear reactor, sitting on the backseat looking dry and bored where the brothers were sweating and cursing more and more in direct relation to how many minutes they'd spent on the road. The worst part was that they were travelling south - they'd hit the nice sandy beaches soon, and that wasn't exactly lifting any spirits, because their destination would cut the way short just before the ocean showed. The only good thing about it was the fact that a destination was a destination, no matter where it was: at least they'd get out of the car and working on the case.

They'd barely arrived when the corpses started piling up. Whatever was on the hunt had clearly been spooked by the swarm of hunters: its most recent victim was found by a local woman who'd spent the warm morning training her yellow, overly fat and friendly labrador retriever in the nearby woods. The corpse was that of an 8-years-old Mexican girl; she seemed mummified and Dean couldn't get the sight off his eyes for the rest of the day. He'd feared it'd follow him into his dreams but he didn't get any sleep, as the next alert came later that evening. The remaining children had been found equally mummified and buried with red candles in upright grave pits not too far from the site the first victim had been discovered from.

Sam took the corpse-examining job while Dean spoke with all of the family members of the children as he could get his hands on before the real feds got too close.  
At that point, the case had turned from weird to suspiciously familiar, although the resemblance wasn't all too uncanny. Sam called Dean when he was still hiding out inside the bar - definitely not drinking on the job, he tried to insist.

"Whatever, Dean. What did they say?"

"They said," Dean uttered with his beer still running down his throat, "that the kids were fine and then they were gone. Taken through the window, no signs of forced entry so it seems they opened up the windows themselves. I checked, by the way, no ugly claw marks anywhere."

"Yeah. Well, I think it still has to be a shtriga, and I think I know who it is."

"You _think_ you know?" Dean repeated unimpressedly, but the full truth was, he was all ready to go gank things.  
Problem with shtrigas was that they weren't particularly gank-able. In fact, they were the opposite.

"There's a woman in town, Alicia," Sam started, waiting if Dean had heard of her.

By then, Dean had.  
"The inappropriately sexy chick that miscarried thrice and went batshit?"

"According to lore," Sam continued in his usual tone of voice that messaged he was throughoutly done with Dean's immature attitude and hoped to get back to business, "a shtriga is not born that way, but rather becomes so through the loss of her children - for example through still-birth or -"

"Miscarrying."

"Mm."  
The phone let out a loud rattling sound that threatened to burst Dean's ear.

"What the hell, man?" he growled, but the noise continued as if Sam was currently in the progress of shoving his phone in his pocket as fast as he could.  
The call survived the ordeal, and Dean didn't hang up.  
Through the clutter of noise he could hear voices, and then Sam's again.

"I wasn't -", he seemed to be saying before he got cut off.

"... through the security c.... .... ... enough to warrant..." spoke another voice near indecipherably before the ear-breaking rattling started again.

Dean raised a brow and ended the call. Castiel was there next to him, looking at him curiously.  
"I think Sam's in some trouble," Dean explained, "Sounds like the useless slob missed a camera and got arrested."

"He'll handle himself."

"Yup, I was thinking the same thing here. So - uh - we have a witch to kill. Now. Know any local kids that would offer up to act the bait part, because..."  
Dean's eyes got stuck on Castiel and they both squinted at one another; Dean raised his chin a little and leaned closer.  
"You're an angel," he stated then.

"I am an angel," Castiel confirmed rather amusedly.

"You can smite her, right?"

"I can."

"Then what the hell are we waiting for?"

 

* * *

 

Alicia Brown lived in a house she'd inherited from her parents - it wasn't big, but in this economy, a house of your own was a nice thing to have. At the very least, you could sell it off when things got rough and settle somewhere smaller and less bothersome.  
Or at least that was what Dean thought when they parked the car and approached the house; he'd never paid much attention to economy, housing or markets. Castiel appeared to be tuned to less earthly matters, growing more disturbed and slipping further into his soldier mode the closer they got: there was no question about this woman being a dark witch, which on its own was bad enough, but didn't yet make her a shtriga.

No one seemed to be home, but Dean didn't bother knocking to find out for sure. He was quite certain they'd make a better impression if they first politely announced themselves, but truth was easier found when it was delivered in the state of the art, and as such, he picked the back door's lock to let them in. The window panes had black and red candles sitting still and dark on worn copper plates, and the house smelled of rotten meat and peppermint. In the dead silence he could nearly hear the lot's value decrease. It was free-falling through the dusty carpeted floor and into the basement, probably down from there too until it hit level Hell and knocked a demon unconscious.

Unlike Dean who stood low and ready, Castiel walked more relaxed in here than he'd done outside. His posture was straight and his steps heavy but casual: he wasn't stalking anything, he wasn't even being cautious. He moved to the kitchen and swiped the surface of the table, then turned towards Dean who was standing there brows raised and expecting some kind of an explanation.  
He seemed sad and burdened.  
"Grief lingers heavy in this house," he said, eyes scanning the walls now as if they were speaking to him, "There's no doubt we are in the right place."

"The hell are you doing, trying to get us killed?" Dean hissed, but his caution was falling apart too in the lack of support and reinforcement from outside factors.

Castiel's eyes stopped to one point in the ceiling.  
"I'm certain you can tell by the smell," he said with a small shrug.

They moved to the stairs; Dean was still in the lead, although Castiel's ability to sense auras was good enough to tell him early on when a soul was approaching. This was the only way Dean had ever known to hunt: in front of the one that depended on him for life, the one who guarded his back with his own. Him on the front, the one he loved behind him - never in front. Never in direct line of fire.

The upstairs bedroom had its door ajar, and the whole upper level smelled of decay so strongly that the sweetness of the stench threatened to turn Dean's stomach. He'd smelled dead bodies in his life so often he was nearly used to it now, but there was no way for it to become something he didn't _mind.  
_ They entered the room togethere. She was hanging from the ceiling, some kind of dry herbs scattered on her chest, with a blood-stained rope turning her bloated neck into an hourglass of horror. Castiel walked to her body and held it as Dean cut the rope - they'd burn her, salt her, just to be on the safe side. The angel laid the stiff body on the floor and placed his palm upon her stomach.

"She turned to witchcraft in her grief, tried to offer blood for blood and this is what she turned herself into," he spoke quietly as Dean fought to hold back the contents of his stomach, "In doing so, she consumed the life force of her growing child. She carried a stillborn. Perhaps her daughter was her first victim, the one whose sacrifice turned her."

"That's why she killed herself? Christ, the smell - Cas - let's get the fuck out of here and get the pyre ready."  
Dean's fingertips brushed through the angel's hair, but when he was moving, a thought hit him harder than a malevolent ghost could have, stopping him on the spot.  
"Cas?" he called out again, his voice strained and strangled.

Castiel stood up and looked at him with a worried expression, but Dean's thoughts were racing.

"How old was the child?"

"Seven months. The signs are unusually limited, she might not have known at all before it was too late," the older answered, trying to understand what of it was of such great interest to Dean.

Outside, a blackbird was singing, marking the sun's descend towards the golden horizon. Dean shivered, his eyes turning towards the dead witch on the floor.  
 _A shtriga is not born that way. The child would be completely human... Requires a young child's body - the younger, the more essence..._

"Cas, the body. The body of the child. Does it have to be - does it have to be alive?"  
Dean swallowed and his nausea was gone. It was gone and the cold was back - the stiffness in him resembled that of the body he was already thinking of violating, wondering how to best cut it open; suddenly, he wasn't finishing a case anymore. Against everything his logical mind was telling him and against the now somehow muffled screaming of his conscience, he was trying to figure out how to steal the unborn child from the womb of the witch to create a monster of his own making.  
Castiel stared at him like he'd gone mad, and the full truth was, Dean wouldn't have vouched for his own sanity. Not there, not then, but he couldn't move either. He watched the fight inside Castiel - the way his lips parted, the swift glance at the body, the hesitation. The tell-tale sign when he looked away from Dean. The answer was no. His answer was no. The body would not need to be alive.

"God... God, it doesn't, does it? Cas, fuck - Cas?"

"No," the angel said sternly, turning back to him, "I will not allow you to do it."

"Cas -"

"I said no, Dean."

"Who would we be hurt-"

"I will _not_ do it, Dean! _I_ will _not_."

The angel's voice was loud and left Dean's ears ringing in a way that he couldn't tell for certain was because of the volume. He suspected there had been the sound of the angel's own voice mixed in there somewhere, a stern Enochian command to cease. It made the younger tremble and he _wanted_ to give up - he _wanted_ to burn the corpse of the dead fetus inside the womb of its dead mother and he _wanted_ to be logical, but no matter how much he wanted all that and more, his muscles refused to move and some primal part of him was screaming as loud as Castiel was.  
For a while, he feared he'd break down there - just lose control and start sobbing, and maybe it would have broken the obsession. Maybe after that the air would have been cleaner like a storm returned the freshness into midst of a humid heat. Instead, the wave of pain hit him and passed him, leaving him empty with _nothing_ but the craving.

"It's okay, Cas."  
He wasn't entirely sure what was okay, but the older's  _no_ wasn't quite good enough yet.  
"Let's build the fire."

 

* * *

 

Dean could sense the tension between them. It wasn't angry - it was scared, confused and lost. It was just like him but one thing he knew: the more he thought about it, the more he wanted it. The child was dead. Its mother was dead. Who knew if a child that young even had a soul yet? He didn't dare to ask - instead, he listened to the voice message left to him from Sam's sock phone and kept hacking down wood for the pyre.

_"Chilly avenue with some rats heading for the docks. Funny guy that Charlie, could you send him my regards on his birthday? Remember, it's the sixth."_

It was a plain informational message. Translated from Winchester to simple English, it meant that Sam had gotten himself in some deep shit and needed Charlie to dig him out so that they could meet outside town at six tomorrow in the nearest motel with a name beginning with the letter R.  
Dean made a phone call and managed to crack a smile at Charlie's "not again" tone of voice. She promised to have Sam free by next morning - better yet, she'd feed some leads to distract the investigation in order for the men to get a good distance between themselves and California.

After all that was done away with, darkness had already fallen and despite the starry sky, the area was black enough to make their work difficult. Or at least Dean's - Castiel was doing good like the dark wasn't much of an issue for him.

"Cas, hey..."

They were piling the wood in the proper form: next, they'd need to prepare the body and drag it down to the burning site. Then they'd need to get going and fast - the fire would most likely alarm unwanted attention.  
Castiel cast a warning look at him, but it was now or never and Dean knew it. He stopped, wiped his forehead clean and demanded with his look for Castiel to stop as well and listen to what he was saying.

"Let's talk about this, Cas."

"There's nothing to talk about," the angel replied simply, yet he didn't return to the task at hand.  
He was waiting. Dean hoped it was because he, too, was looking for a way out.

"No, I'm pretty sure there is. I just want to understand. I get it, believe me, that murdering babies is bad. But this one's - this one's already dead. So's the family, everything. What we're burning here... is our only chance, Cas. To have - our own."

Castiel looked away into the quietly rustling forest. Dean shivered in the night's warm wind, casting a worried look in the direction of the house as if fearing the shtriga was there listening. A ritual suicide seemed foolproof enough, he thought, but there was always a nasty-ass chance that his gut feeling was wrong. Overhearing a couple of shady guys talk about stealing the corpse of your child was in and of itself a good enough reason to rise from the dead.

"Dean, you don't understand," the angel spoked after a moment, startling Dean so that he jumped, breath hitching in his throat.  
A faint smile crossed the older's features, softening the way he'd appeared to Dean. The voice with which the older continued was softer, if still stern.  
"Raising a corpse is black magic. It's necromancy. Even for an angel. If I return life to any living being for the sole purpose of it serving my needs, I am a necromancer, and necromancy is blasphemous, unholy magic."

"Is this a moral question?"

"No," Castiel sighed, "It's a question of my grace, too. Many things that are branded blasphemous are not so, but my heart speaks against this."

"You don't even have a heart, so I think that's a weak-ass argument, Cas."

"You know what I mean."

Dean sighed.  
"I do," he admitted and shivered again.

"There's more," Castiel continued and his patience surprised Dean.

Usually at this stage he'd be furious - Dean didn't stop questioning him, pushing him past his limits, ignoring his refusal and disregarding his drive to do good. Dean knew he was wrong, yet Castiel seemed to be as torn as he was, so close to breaking against himself for the sake of this, and that was new to Dean. He'd never even thought the subject could be sore for the angel, too; that perhaps he desired the same thing as Dean did. Even if they had wholly different reasons, it seemed plain now that a child of their own was something they mutually wished for, a dream that was so close to being granted, yet with a price tag set up too high and tied to a risk factor of an unknown value. Most things in their lives seemed to come that way. Most of them ended bad, and Dean wasn't stupid. He still remembered everything he'd ever read of nephilim.  
But it would be theirs - something born out of their very essences combined. Could that truly be the worst of them, and none of the good?

For a moment, Dean could have sworn he saw the blue light shine through Castiel's eyes when the older looked at him, but when that moment passed, he admitted it could have been the natural light reflecting from his eyes just as well.

"A nephil is guaranteed to grow to be much stronger than any human - and has the potential to become much stronger than an angel, too. You can't control that, Dean. My plan to win the civil war in Heaven with _Crowley_ was more foolproof than even attempting to raise a nephil. They are monsters, Dean. You can't reason with them because they do not have the capacity to feel, nor do they have the desire for order and justice that holds an angel back from wreaking havoc and leaving pure chaos in their wake."

"So there's not a snowball's chance it'd grow up good?"

"No," Castiel said, but Dean could hear that he was uncertain.

"Cas, be honest - how many of them you've actually known?"

The angel turned away.

"How much of it was just Metatron telling you a bunch of shit to get you to kill one?"

"I've heard enough, Dean."  
Castiel's voice was quiet and calm, but Dean didn't know if he addressed the subject or his questioning or both. Regardless, they resumed building the pyre in silence and once it was done, Castiel disappeared in the fluttering of giant wings in the air. Moments later he reappeared, carrying the corpse of the woman - and with a one lingering look at Dean, he disappeared again.

Dean stood there, staring not at the place from where Castiel had vanished but at the bloated corpse of the shtriga they hadn't needed to kill.  
It was his choice to make, and he didn't know why it had become so all of a sudden. His view climbed along the trees to the barely lit sky above and he stood there breathing in the fouling night air, trying to read the stars for an easy way out.  
Then he turned, picked up the ax with him and went to chop down enough wood for a smaller fire. He'd need some light.

 

* * *

 

The early morning light broke with a hint of a cool day's beginning in the air, a promise of relief that Dean hoped would last. His fingers ached and he couldn't get the stench off - he'd showered three times before giving up the room and driving off to the sunrise with the car that suddenly felt like it was made of porcelain. His bag was jumping on the empty backseat and the space that he had next to him only served to make him feel lonelier. It took him too little time to reach motel R; from there, he headed off to a café, but his coffee tasted like corpses and then some, the sandwich even more.  
When he walked out again, the clouds seemed to promise him rain: he wasn't sure if it was a good sign.

The road caught his feet and he started walking along it. From distance he could already hear the waves: the crashing sounds of white foam blades cutting into the drying sand, then retreating back into the ocean. When he stood at the side of the path running along the beach and dropping stairs every twenty feet or so from its spine onto the sand like the hundred short limbs of a giant concrete centipede, he found himself pressed flat against the fence so as to not get in the way of normal people who did not smell of death. Those people spent their mornings jogging to the tune of some idle pop song blasting in their cheap plugs connected to the expensive music players, and amongst them Dean felt like he'd failed the world. It didn't end there: he'd failed himself, his brother, his angel, his friends and his order. He'd failed everything, and the evidence was buried in salt in an iron container, just in case dead feti did have souls and he'd be the first victim.

Ironically, the iron container had once been a large cookie box.  
He'd thrown out the bullets it had previously contained - they littered the bottom of a plastic bag like some thug's spare rounds. Pure silver, each one of them: most were marked with symbols or sigils for good measure.

Dean Winchester had the stillborn corpse of a dead child-eating witch in the trunk of his '67 Impala, locked in a cookie box, salted like beef. Yet he felt like he'd not managed to add in anywhere near the amount of salt he'd preferred - the corpse had barely fit inside when the box was empty. The body was large and would have probably looked quite child-like if death hadn't made it so grotesquely malshaped and discoloured.  
It'd make for a great conversation back at the bunker if anyone would venture to the freezer and think to look inside the seemingly innocent, huge iron container. No, it had to be hidden better than that.

What the hell had driven him into cutting it out in the first place?

 

* * *

 

Rain followed them back to Kansas.

Castiel knew - Dean knew that he knew even though he never said anything. It shone from him. Dean wasn't sure if he'd left at all back when he'd vanished from the pyre. He couldn't remember hearing the soft sound of his wings: perhaps he'd stayed to watch him fail the test. Perhaps he'd stayed there the whole time, through the butchery and womb-robbing and the disposal of evidence. Perhaps he'd been there still when Dean had held that stiff, slippery and bloated _thing_ in his hands and then walked a few steps away from the pyre, held it away from the line of fire and vomited repeatedly and violently onto the roots of an old oak.

Maybe he'd even seen him turn the cookie box upside down, sending the silver bullets raining down into the white Walmart bag with the smiley face, and desperately fit the corpse into the box trying to not tear too much pseudo-skin and tissue from the decaying form. He definitely should have seen Dean attempt the salt burial. He'd shaken the whole time so that now the whole back of the car was full of salt. It sounded like an army of rats running about each time they hit a bump now that the car was moving.

Sam was oblivious to this but of course he sensed the tension between Dean and the angel. He didn't say anything about it, but Dean knew he would have wanted to and that he would if they did not start talking soon. Their problems were theirs until it became a permanent issue - permanent issues spelled trouble for everyone.  
If only he'd known.

Dean hid the cookie box in the middle of his clothes inside his large travel bag and carried it all into his bedroom, where the whole black bag with his clothes and weapons inside stood for twenty minutes, still on his floor with him sitting on the bed just staring at it. And then Castiel entered without knocking. He locked the door behind him.

"For now," he stated emotionlessly, "we have to treat it like a homunculus."  
Those were the first words he spoke to Dean since they'd parted in the forest, and Dean looked at him in stunned surprise. He stared back and his face was as void of expression as his voice had been.  
"Especially with the damage your precautions have inevitably caused to it. There's no use forcing life into something that will only die again within minutes. It needs to grow, so we need to provide an environment."

"Dad had something on nurturing homun... what's the plural?"

" _Homunculi._ The Letters are sure to have more," Castiel sighed.  
He cast a look into Dean's eyes that was so full of desperation that Dean felt his heart breaking at impact. Somehow, he was certain his own grief was as strong as the other's.  
"I'd estimate that the time from initial corruption to full rejection and regeneration will near four months. It's enough time for the body to grow."

To Dean's further surprise, the angel turned the lights down to a reddish-orange dim glow and started undressing.  
"Cas?" he breathed out, terrified.

"We might as well finish what we started, Dean."

'What I started,' the younger corrected in his mind. They'd never joined like that before: there was no foreplay, no touching. When Dean pushed his barely erect length inside the angel's forcefully relaxed body with no pleasure and lube trickling down his thighs, he was already expecting what came next. Castiel leaned over him and breathed against his ear. He'd never thought he'd breath the words out loud, that he'd  _mean_ them, but here he was, and he knew exactly what he needed to do.

_"Will you submit to me your flesh and your bone to use as my own?"_

_"I will."_

_"Your consent is true and will stand even in the face of pain and death."_

_"My flesh and my bone is yours."_

_"Are you ready?"_

"Yes."

Dean had been possessed in his life, but feeling a part of an angel's grace crossing the distance between them and leave the body he associated with Castiel so heavily it could as well have been Castiel's own was different to anything he'd experienced before. It was like universe itself had opened to him and suddenly the other body was his body just as well, yet at the same time, neither was his and what had been his flesh felt invaded and like it was expanding, wearing thin.  
He closed his eyes, and it wasn't by his own choice. He was afraid - so powerless and completely overwhelmed, pushed aside in his own body, unable to move, unable to make a sound - but then he felt Castiel in him, and something about his energy was so familiar that it took away the fear and left just the grief that had already been there with them both.  
  
 _Dean_ , he heard inside his own mind, _I need you to reach back to me. To come to me here and brand me. Use what is strongest in you. I will wait the while it takes._  
  
Dean struggled: no amount of grief, desperation or anger took him anywhere. He couldn't fight it, there was too much between them, it was like trying to push through a mile of solid glass with nothing but his bare hands - the smooth, invisible wall didn't even pretend it cared about his struggles. Within it somewhere he could feel a strange pulse, however; it was towards that which he set his course.

_I can't, Cas. I can't._

_You can. I'm here with you. We have time._

_I'm so sorry, Cas. For everything._

_I am as well. Dean._

 


	4. Genesis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, He took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib He had taken out of the man, and He brought her to the man.
> 
> The man said,  
>  “This is now bone of my bones  
>  and flesh of my flesh."
> 
> _\- Genesis 2:21-23_

* * *

 

Dean remembered the warmth and vaguely the feeling of glass suddenly turning to jelly and from that to smooth pudding that flowed around him with the colours and shapes of galaxies merely tumbling along his skin. Then it was dark. He didn't even remember what he'd thought of, what had caused his palms to become that much firmer than the solid wall in front of him.  
He woke up as himself, and Castiel sat there on the side of the bed with both feet on the floor, still naked and arms around his body. He was so still that at first Dean didn't think much of it, but then the wavering breath came, the shiver and the pained movement.

_Chained to a comet_ , his mind told him as he climbed up, astonished of how well his own body responded to his every command as if it was somehow a new thing, not a state he'd been in for over thirty years and only momentarily lost.  
It was becoming clearer and clearer that he'd only been out for a couple minutes, but in his mind, he felt like he'd been asleep for a thousand years.

He reached a hand for the angel's shoulder and when Castiel didn't react negatively (or otherwise, as was the case) he brought his arm over his chest and pulled him against himself. Dean kissed his neck gently and lightly, hugging him carefully but quite tightly in contrast.  
"Cas?"

Another wavering breath escaped the other as a response.

"Cas."  
He laid them both down on the bed. The older's eyes were misty and lost and his skin had fallen pale: he breathed shallow and fast and trembled against Dean's body.  
"Cas, dammit, what's wrong?"

Castiel shook his head, or rather threw it agitatedly to one side before closing his eyes and frowning.  
"I told you," he spoke from between clenched teeth, "It's a wound. A burn. And it hurts."

Dean pressed his face into the angel's dark hair and wished it could have been different: that he could go back to the smiles and the waking up in a heap and holding hands and morning coffees and going to bed to sleep but ending up making love four times in a row instead.  
He couldn't form a single tear but his chest ached and he felt like he couldn't breathe. None of this felt right; it felt like murder and worse. It felt wrong. It felt of every shade of the evil that it was.

 

* * *

 

**Autumn**

Death was shedding from the skin of the developing body. It swam motionlessly in the middle of the tank in the green-blue tinted water they kept renewing on a schedule, and it looked like a baby now, if still pale like those stored in large jars in medical museums and scattered in the creepy basements of every third horror movie. In the background summer faded into shades of yellow, orange and red; it brought with it a sudden dead silence on the supernatural front, and Dean was glad about it, as it delivered him from the constant need to make excuses for why he suddenly didn't want to be on the field and why Castiel was still sick, when by all means an angel was never so.  
They'd avoided the subject in private, too, especially the parts concerning how they intended to explain the situation to the rest. Telling the whole truth would show everyone what horrible things they'd done for such selfish ends, but lying would only add to it, and they'd learned lessons about lying.

In the end, they would have no other choice but to be honest about it. Dean hoped it would only have to come with the child herself - surely seeing a live being would do much to blunt the edge of the terror that she'd been wrought from.  
It was all written down in a leather-cover notebook in painstaking detail, sometimes in Dean's handwriting, at others in Castiel's. They told everything they could remember about the process to make a record, no matter how it all would end, for the future Letters to learn from. Dean hoped it would not be one of the books with blood splattered over the unfinished pages in the middle - he hoped that instead, it would have a picture of a being that emerged from the darkest of places as no worse than the rest of them. It seemed unlikely, but what else could he do than to cling onto this hope now that they'd gotten this far?

Castiel's state never changed. He felt ill and in pain and moved only when he had to - when they took care of the vessel and when he wrote down his experiences and all changes he felt in him, however small. Knowing how much the other could endure, Dean suspected a lot of his sudden unwillingness to overcome the discomfort was due to his guilt and that just like Dean, he was hiding away from everyone. Since the definition of everyone most explicitly included other angels, he had no other place to go but the bedroom, so it was there where he stayed.

Sam was growing suspicious; Dean had stopped him in the library, laid a hand over the book he'd planned to pull out of the section from which most of their research was from, and promised he would hear soon enough. And Dean wanted to think that he wasn't lying: he'd just need to figure out how to say it all aloud. How to confess to such a horrible thing as it was that he'd committed? Witch or not, Alicia had been a human being. Mutilating corpses was hardly anything new for either of them, but this was different. This wasn't right.  
  
One morning on his way to nowhere in particular, firmly seated behind the wheel of his beloved Impala and for once willingly alone, Dean wondered if he'd felt the same if it had been just an organ he'd stolen. The answer was no. Children, even dead not yet born children, were sacred. It was embedded so deep inside his humanity to consider them so, and what they were doing now was witchcraft in and of itself. There was good kind of magic and the kind of magic that was only ever used wrong, the occult that separated itself and the rest of its ilk from the world of people and borderlined the twilight of beasts. Good kinds of magic were for protection, and Dean had long since learned to respect it for what it did instead of judging it by the covers, but necromancy was far beyond the fine line. It was the darkest kind of magic he knew, and there were very few who even attempted - and yet there was no other word for what they were doing. It was witchraft and it was black magic; it wasn't for protection, it wasn't for knowledge, it was for selfish gain.

Did that make him a witch?

He wasn't sure anymore.

The car stopped with a swing at the abandoned parking lot he knew well from before. Dean stepped out and locked the doors, felt the gun in its holster by his hip and straightened out his clothes to cover the shape. The air had turned cold and wet, and wind howled through the naked trees as he started walking along the unpaved track forwards. There was a small beach reserved for swimming at this end of the lake, and at the far end of it, a dock that Dean had found in his liking. That was where he headed, to sit on the moist planks above the still calm waters, to feel more at ease and to look for any kind of clarity where he now had none left for himself. Wind reached for his hair and pushed between the strands; around him, the world was as good as dead. Birds had fallen silent and the lake barely lapped at the foot of the dock that he settled at the head of, and in this moment, for the first time since forever, he felt the presence of something sacred with him. Eyes upon the horizon he breathed in and out, attempting to clear his mind and open it to fresh thoughts, feeling like this was the much needed spring cleaning inside him that he'd pushed back for a good while. He was getting what he wanted. Was it worth it?  
Was it worth Castiel's suffering and the sacrifice he'd made? Was it worth the guilt Dean felt, and wasn't that on its own an indication of the answer?

Even now that solitude was a conscious choice, Dean longed for the angel by his side. He wished he could have had the words to ask him directly - what was it that Castiel wanted? What was it that had driven him into this madness, when he'd first seemed so firmly against it? What had made him change his mind?

The lake did not tell him, and its wisdom stayed locked beneath the waves. God remained silent as well. No lightning struck the lost man on his way back to the car.

 

* * *

 

"Mix it as I pour, okay?"

Dean held he bag of flour above the bowl and Castiel looked too nervous for the scale of the task in front of him. For weeks now, he'd been mixing a delicate potion to grow a homunculus without the essence of one - in other words, he deliberately failed a potion that was, even when mixed properly, a mixture much beyond the abilities of the majority of the most experienced practitioners of alchemy, in order to make it work for what they needed. He'd reinvented the potion by combining what knowledge he had of the dark arts and by tapping into resources he shouldn't have had, informants that belonged beyond the great divide between earth and hell itself. He hardly let Dean near the water at all, barely allowed him to replace the water in the tank; he oversaw the human's every movement in a strict atmosphere of unforgiving silence to the moment the container was lowered back inside its grave. Yet it was impossible for him to do it all alone, especially in his weakened state.  
Most of the magic they used was in Enochian and Dean found that despite his studies, he couldn't understand a lot of it. Castiel explained what he asked, but he didn't ask much.

Despite this full-time job they had to themselves now, Castiel behaved like the pie was the most difficult thing he'd ever tried to conjure into existence. His grip was firm but tense when he mixed the flour that Dean poured, as if afraid the egg might spoil if he did it too fast or the sugar would turn sour in he did it too slow. Dean had his arm around the angel's waist - he wasn't afraid of accidentally dumping in the whole bag of flour. They'd just need to put in a few more eggs and a couple bags more sugar if that'd happen. It wasn't the end of the world for him.  
Instead, he enjoyed having the angel there in the fully lit kitchen, doing something that kept his mind a few steps further from the black magic he was wading waist-deep in. Behind them, Kevin was leaning to the counter; Dean could have sworn the prophet's bright orange and yellow shirt with Coca Cola print spelling out the world UNIVERSITY across the chest was heating up his back like the oven burned at the front of his jeans, and occasionally the younger man reminded them of his existence by chuckling at their efforts.

"Kev, get the dish and make it ready, okay?"

"'kay."

Castiel's eyes flickered towards Dean and Dean smiled at him fondly.

"Doing good there, Cas. Keep going until it's even."

The older nodded and returned to the task he'd been burdened with. Dean moved to assemble the apple slices, the spices and the sugar on the counter next to the large dish that Kevin was spreading butter over. Once he was done they both had to declare Castiel's dough good enough for him to unwillingly give up mixing what was already perfectly smooth. Dean guided his hand as he poured the dough into the dish and gave him and Kevin both spoons to scoop up the remaining layers from the bowl while he sprinkled the apples on the pie and finished it with cinnamon and syrup.  
When he turned, Kevin was trying to explain to the angel that he was supposed to eat the raw dough, not try and make it useful somehow.

Forty minutes later, the bunker was as full as it had ever been during their time, all of their manpower aimed at exterminating the fresh-out-of-the-oven apple pie which had for a painful twenty minutes by then filled the whole underground structure with the sweetest, most tempting of scents. Everyone was there: Charlie with her fancy pixie cut, too busy talking to properly cut into her slice and her coffee stale enough to have stopped producing steam; Kevin, too busy eating to contribute to the conversation; Mrs. Tran who was sharing the secrets of good cooking with the more than relieved at his grand premiere in the art of pie making but still nervous Castiel; Jennifer, drinking coffee like no tomorrow as she had after being freed of the restrictions pregnancy had put on her; and Sam with one hand on the handle of his fork and the other arm protectively and firmly wrapped around their sleeping son.

Dean had made his decision with his mouth full of pie. He'd tell his brother that night. A part of him wished the man would stop them, force them to give up. A part of him knew Sam wouldn't. The whole of him knew he wouldn't be able to keep it further - there was no way no one would notice that he and Cas were spending a good majority of their time secretive and sulky inside the botany section, and everyone knew it wasn't cabbage or carrots that they were so devotedly caring for.

 

* * *

 

The worst was the expressionless silence that reigned as Dean spoke. He was looking directly at Sam, trying to see any indication of how he was taking the madness in, but the taller simply stared back at him like he was giving a report of the day's training.  
Finally, Dean had nothing more to say, not counting the vast multitudes of excuses he wanted to make but knew better than to attempt. Sam examined him for a good long minute before finally turning away and starting to show the vast amount of discomfort he was holding at bay.  
When he turned back, he seemed sad, almost devastated.  
  
"What are you doing, Dean?" he asked quietly, lost.

Dean didn't know. He couldn't even respond. He just stood there, screaming inside that that was precisely the question he'd been asking himself ever since the shtriga case.

"Show me the notes you've made."

"They're... personal," Dean tried but he felt like he'd lost his spine and that it had been recently replaced with a chain of marshmallows.

"Show them to me"

The corridor to his room from the warmth of the library had never felt quite so long before, nor had his door been that heavy when he'd last opened it. From the media room, the echos of loud laughter carried clear to the rest of the bunker. They'd left the door open, but there was no fear of being eavesdropped here.  
It wasn't just one book of notes now - it was two leatherbacks, each page filled, most with details of the progress they'd made and the setbacks suffered along the way but some containing notes of other kinds, left behind by Castiel; confirmed and unconfirmed knowledge of nephilim, notes of a nephil's development in relation to the necromantic, angelic and human steps taken along the way, talk of homunculus and notably disassociated descriptions of the changes the angel felt in his essence at the effects of both black magic and the corruption progressing inside him.

Sam settled by the table with them in front of the picture that Dean carried of their mother, looking through the pages in silence for a long time. Then, upon reaching the last book, he returned back to look at parts he'd kept his fingers in as markers for.  
"Where's the third?"

"I don't know," Dean replied truthfully - Castiel had taken it earlier and after that, he hadn't seen it.  
"It's just a few pages in. You're not missing much."

Sam's eyes were firmly upon the book and he looked sicker by the minute. Finally he stood up, piled the books on top of one another and took them under his arm, backs pressed against his chest. He looked at Dean seriously and decisively.  
"I'll read through these in full," he announced, and Dean felt like he didn't have much room for argument in the matter.  
"When you get to Cas alone, tell him to bring the third."

"Sam -"

"Dean, just don't. I can't talk about this. Not yet. I don't get it. I need to understand first. Then we can talk."  
Sam grimaced. Dean was quite certain he couldn't look at him the same anymore, that the sight of him was making the younger sick.  
"Thank you for telling me."

He left the room with that, hesitant and lingering by the door like he still would have wanted to say something but in the end decided against it and simply vanished into the corridor. With a heavy sigh, Dean settled on the bed and started thinking about a long, hot shower.  
He never made it that far.

 

* * *

 

"How many of them had actual families?" Dean asked desperately from the ceiling. "I mean no offense but I can't think of all too many angels stepping in to be father figures."

The corner of Castiel's mouth twitched up in a pained grimace.

"Do you think we can make a difference?"

The angel shook his head almost unnoticeably. He wore the Zeppelin shirt again, and Dean noticed himself unable to look away; no matter how stressed he was, he still craved closer to the other. They hadn't slept together since he'd consented for possession. It hadn't felt right - there was a barrier between them, one that kept them distant even when they were close.  
Shyly, the younger turned on his side and laid a palm over the gently rising and falling stomach of the older's. Castiel jumped slightly at the contact but didn't react beyond that, so Dean continued stroking him and rubbing at his belly around the navel through the soft grey fabric.

"You look good, Cas."

The older brought his hand over Dean's and Dean found himself breathing out in relief. A hint of a smile warmed up the other's features but his eyes were still scanning the ceiling like Dean's had been prior to the change of pose.  
The younger leaned his head on the angel's chest and breathed in the familiar scent, eyes looking straight ahead along Castiel's body and over the jean-fake boner on him at the slit of wall visible from between his legs.

"Do you think we'll be able to love her?"

Castiel moved - it could have as well been a shake of his head as it could have been a nod.  
"We will love her," he then spoke quietly but confidently, "beyond all measure."

Dean gave that thought a moment, but it didn't make him feel any better.  
"Do you think we'll need to kill her in the end?"

Castiel shivered.  
He let out a pained breath and Dean was sure he'd closed his eyes.  
"Yes."

A silence fell over them, a thick, painful kind of silence that was full of the pressure that Dean felt closing in on his throat.  
  
"She won't look like the witch. Not for long," Castiel spoke then.

"What do you mean?" Dean asked him in turn, his fingers returning to play with the other's body.  
Stroking, poking, scritching and stretching gently, moving down to caress his thigh from the top and then from the inner side. Castiel spread his legs ever so slightly to allow his fingers more room between them.

"They adjust their vessels to appeal to the caretaker. She will look just like us in the end. She will behave just like us, too, as she is the residue of ourselves."

It was Dean's turn to shiver.

"It's different from natural development, of course. A mask they paint on themselves. They're like shapeshifters for the first few years, adjusting and adjusting until they appear perfect - they recreate their body in the image of what is expected of them, they become ideal so that they will be loved. They do it as a means of survival. It's an act of self-preservation: appealing to the instincts of those that will protect them while they're still weak."

"All kids do that."

Castiel huffed warmly.  
"I adore your faith, Dean. And your stubborn trust in good."

"What else do I have, Cas?"  
Dean's fingers retreated from the warmth of the older's inner thigh. With a heavy sigh he turned around to face the angel.  
"What do _you_ have?"

"My faith in you and my trust in your judgement."

They made love slowly that night, taking back the time wasted between them; Dean couldn't remember taking as much time to simply explore the angel's body since the first night they'd spent together like this, and he felt like he'd already forgotten the absolute care and kindness that Castiel showed him when he let him take the lead. The feel of the older filling him, joining into him and doing it as lovingly as he did made Dean lose his breath and beg for more in quiet, wavering whispers lost against the angel's open mouth. Dean felt so bared and so vulnerable and so _safe_ there with the older gently moving in and against him, his own hips bumping desperatedly against the other to seek that closeness and pleasure over and over again. His nails dragged long marks into the back and sides of Castiel's and when release washed over him, he allowed it to take him fully, relaxing to the strength of the angel holding him close.

 

* * *

 

**Winter**

Dean's whole body shook when he pushed his arms beneath the water's surface and reached for the child's body within. He wrapped his long fingers around the smallness of the empty vessel and brought it out, holding his breath as he expected the warmth of the potion to disappear, leaving him with the rigid corpse that he'd months earlier submerged in the first waters Castiel had prepared for them, doubled over in pain more often than standing straight.  
Instead, the baby felt soft and alive; he could feel its heart beat, the slow rythmic thunder of the body's. The morbid feel of it had disappeared - now the sensation he was left with was a mixture of amazement and strangeness.

Castiel moved closer, placing his index and middle fingers over the baby's forehead. His eyes looked deep into Dean's before he nodded; it was ready, and so was he.

Sam was there as well. This was the second time he saw the vessel, and he'd still said very little about it. Even now his expression was conflicted and locked as he watched the small body that Dean held in his arms. The vaguely blue-green water ran down the skin of the vessel's, dripping into the earth below. It smelled of lavender and copper.

"We need to keep her warm," Castiel spoke, breaking a ten-minute long silence, "and prepare the crib. She'll be tired when it's over."

And with that, he turned away and walked past Sam. Dean saw them exchanging glances, but the only thing he had thoughts to spare for was the vessel he held. He knelt and placed her over his knees, removed his black hoodie and wrapped her inside of it. The garden was the warmest place in the bunker and he didn't feel the change of temperature even with the thick cloth removed, but once they'd enter the corridor again, the heat of the UV lamps wouldn't hold back the chill of the underground bunker any longer.  
Unexpectedly, Sam smiled.

"Dad would kill you," he spoke with a tone of amusement.  
He stepped closer and tied up the sleeves of Dean's hoodie around the vessel's body, taking the first proper look at her. Dean felt overly protective of the small thing in his arms but reminded himself that Sam was hardly enough of an asshole to harm the vessel now. He reached his fingers to pull aside the cloth that surrounded her face and revealed it in full to the other.

"She looks a lot like her."  
Sam sounded uncomfortable at the notion. Dean couldn't blame him.

"Cas said she'll change."

Sam nodded.  
"That's what he wrote."

Their conversation masked a whole churning ocean of questions that only grew heavier and more demanding the closer the ritual got. What was it exactly that they were bringing into the world, and most importantly, would it put the life of Sam's own child in danger? Would its presence amongst them be nothing but a death sentence to them all?  
None of the questions could be answered, yet for some reason, be it loyalty or empathy or pure inability to act in advance to remove the threat, both Sam and Jennifer had agreed to take the risk.  
Dean didn't know if he was thankful for that, but now that he held the warm and soft bundle against him and watched the vessel breathe like it was just asleep, the thought of anything else was impossible for him. He imagined it was the same for Sam - that there simply was no way to kill this being now, that its fate had been decided for it the moment Dean had cut it out before burning the shtriga that had sucked away the life from the flesh and banished the soul that had been chained to it before. What remained didn't seem so unholy and disturbing anymore. Grace was grace, and Dean couldn't consider the essence of his soul a _corruption_  eitheronce he'd thought too far into the matter. His soul wasn't impure, it wasn't a stain nor was it an infection, a bacteria taking the hold of something proper and pure. The thought of what was him in the most fundamental sense mixing in with Castiel's true form and creating something new was not the kind of a terrible thing that the angel made it out to be, not to Dean. Quite the contrary - he could hardly think of anything he found half as amazing as that idea. It felt like they were planting a seed, a very special and important seed, into a lifeless ground to bring it to bloom. All ground was dead matter in the end; wasn't this just the way life worked? The dead became the basis for new life created by other, yet living things. Those were the rules of the creation that Castiel so feared breaking against. There was no escaping the revered circle of life and in this way, what they were doing wasn't much of a crime against all nature anymore.

That phase seemed past Dean as he brought the vessel in his bedroom.

Jennifer had brought in a crib that had previously been stacked full of old calendars and notebooks in the storeroom. It was a small, white, old wooden crib that rocked gently from side to side whenever they as much as walked past it. It had small carved flowers at both ends and the sides had once been painted to match those, but the flowers and the green garlands that joined them from one end to the other had faded along the years. It was disgustingly traditional and cute and it didn't fit the general feel of the room in the least, but it had been _there_ , and they made use of what they had.  
Castiel parted the blankets and Dean unwrapped his hoodie, now wet from the lavender-smelling potion, from around the vessel. He laid her gently in the crib and the look he shared with Castiel was one of unexplainable tension, a nervousness that lingered so thick in them both that just looking at the other was enough to make it explode into a mess of electric currents charging to and fro inside and between them.

"You ready?" Dean asked nervously.

The angel nodded slowly. He cast a lingering look at the empty vessel slowly breathing in and out through her small, round nose and the rosy doll lips and the long lashes that clumped together, still wet; the scent of the potion was fading from her and was being replaced with the smell of lightning instead. Ozone was the smell of the spirit world and of things from beyond the veil: it was one of the most prominent and easily recognisable signs of the paranormal, an omen Dean had learned to associate with danger.  
She didn't look all too dangerous.

In the silence, the sound of Castiel's blade sliding out and settling into his grip nearly scared Dean. He turned his eyes to it and then upon Castiel; the angel looked back at him and reached out his arm. Dean took from his loose grip the small crystal-like bottle that had once held Castiel's own grace inside and he opened the small, strangely firm cork that sealed the opening. His hand trembled as he brought the bottle to the angel. With a dismissive movement Castiel closed the door behind them from distance, trading a look of disinterest for Dean's expression of nervous amusement, and then he raised the blade, pressed it against his skin and closed his eyes. Enochian words slipped past his lips, a spell to bind his grace within: if he'd not had the broken piece inside him, he'd told Dean, the blade would have cut only the flesh of his vessel. But the spell that he spoke did not protect the changed part in him, as it was not _him_ anymore. The spell wasn't very powerful, either; it merely kept a grace from slipping out and did not protect against actual injury.  
When the blade opened up the skin of his forearm a small, blue strand of mist-like light escaped the wound where hardly any blood at all followed. The grace had a purple tint in it, like a toy pony's rainbow tail, swirling around the usual pale glow of Castiel's that Dean had seen shining from his wounds and when he attacked multiple times before. He'd expected something else entirely, not light at all but rather black smoke like from demons, or at least something that'd appear impure somehow, but the essence trapped within the bottle once he sealed the mouth once more was shining just like an angel's grace and it swirled restlessly inside in smoke-like fashion, only lighter and brilliant like starlight. With an unbothered movement of his fingers Castiel healed the wound from his vessel's arm, leaving behind a smooth surface of undamaged skin. His eyes were fixed upon the bottle, brows creasing.

Dean opened up the palm upon which the bottle rested and Castiel took it in his fist without a word. They stood there for a moment, looking at one another, mouths pale thin slits and breathing tense and uneasy. Then Castiel's shoulders relaxed; with a sigh he turned to face the crib and knelt in front of it. Dean followed him down and watched him bring the bottle to the vessel's small lips: both of them held their breaths as Castiel's thumb pushed aside the cork and he tilted the bottle to the near invisible parting that'd allow the grace to enter the vessel.  
The light packed to the mouth of the bottle and for a moment seemed to linger there like the entrance was too small, but then the vessel breathed in and the light followed the air until none of it was left in the bottle.  
For a moment, the vessel's skin glowed with warm light: the tiny web of veins showed from within the thin skin, and her lids did not cover the flash passing through the pupils and irises. Then it faded - and the body moved.  
  
Dean felt his heart stopping, and then all that he'd been before pushed out of him and escaped along a tear that trickled down his cheek. His hand was on the way into the crib, his eyes incapable of deciding whether to watch her or to watch Castiel. He breathed in scared, then out in awe, and he broke into a smile at the same time the back of his fingers pressed against the smooth, hot surface of the girl's cheek.

"We don't have a name for her," he whispered in terror and amazement, turning to look at his daughter.

Castiel's large fingers wrapped around the nephil's tiny hand.

 


	5. Parenthood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “She was an alien, really - a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine - and he didn't understand anything about her species. But as he tended to her, talked to her, lost a lot of sleep over her, bathed her, watched her nap, and admonished her for the disgusting substances that oozed and urped out of her, he started to fall in love.”  
>  _\- Christopher Moore: A Dirty Job_

* * *

 

"You should call her Elsa," Kevin said with his mouth full of cheap ramen, "You know, after the actress that played the Bride in Frankenstein's Bride. Or after Elsa from Frozen, 'cause she was kind of a super-human freak too, but turned out okay after all."

Dean stared at him, but Sam snorted and started laughing. He hid behind his book before Dean could throw the bottle full of milk formula at him. Castiel sat next to the hunter, appearing to be so hypnotised by the sight of the nephil that he was hardly paying attention.  
"Is Mary too obvious?" Dean asked, turning back to try and aim the tip of the bottle between the girl's lips.  
She didn't seem to have the reflex for suckling - in fact, the object between her lips seemed to be an unappealing complication in her life. She still hadn't made a sound.

"Obvious how exactly?" Sam asked in turn.

"I don't know."  
He sighed, pressing the bottle to get a drop in the girl's mouth. He was certain she'd either choke or starve, and panic was slowly building up inside him although he held up his front quite well.

"Dean," Castiel called out of the blue, taking eye contact to him.  
"It's alright."  
Of course he could sense the tension; perhaps he even heard Dean's heartbeat.

"Could you even try to help, please?" the younger asked with a grimace.

Castiel tilted his head questioningly.

"The name, Cas. You have a daughter. We can't call her a girl for the rest of her life, she needs a name."

"Oh."  
Castiel's brows creased.  
"She does."  
He thought for a moment before getting up and fetching a cup of coffee for both himself and Dean from the kitchen. When he returned, he said; "I like Mary. It's a beautiful name."

"I'd feel strange calling her Mary, though," Dean muttered after a brief silence.  
"But it'd be good for a second name."

"Or a first," Sam noted, "just don't call her that. I can't think of a single girl's name that wouldn't sound awkward ahead of Mary."

Dean gave it a thought.  
"No, you're right."  
He grimaced.  
"Nobody told me naming kids is so hard."

"Yeah, no kidding," Sam chuckled, "They usually have names when you meet them."

"They should come with names. Cas, seriously."  
Castiel lifted his head in attention.  
"You're not helping."

The angel smiled apologetically and hung his head again.  
"I'm sorry. She's quite beautiful. There's so much energy in her. So much... me and you. I'm trying to make apart the essence but I can't, not anymore. I can't tell which is you and which is me. It's all just... her, and it's all us at the same time. It's strange."

Sam rolled his eyes and disappeared behind the book again.  
"Call her Daenerys," his voice returned the conversation back on track.

Dean glared at him.  
"Mary Daenerys must be the worst name I've ever heard, Sam," he huffed and returned to trying to get the girl to drink; "Don't you dare starve on me. I can't pick a name for you in time to get it on the headstone."

"Catelyn?" Sam snorted over the older's mutterings.

"Sam - you're in the wrong universe," Kevin huffed over his empty cup, "Though - Mary Catelyn sounds pretty nice."

"Mary Catelyn sounds like some medieval princess. Come on, what the hell - I don't want to name her after bloody murder, she has enough bad karma on her already."

"How did you idiots not think of a name before, seriously?" Sam asked, leaning back in his chair and sliding down until he was approximately the size of a normal person, "Having her was your whole life for  _months_ and you never realised she'd need a name? I wouldn't adopt a kitten to you two."  
  
Dean grimaced.  
"Shut up, Sam."

 

* * *

 

Dean had to get up and check on the girl every fifteen minutes to make sure she was breathing. He hadn't gotten more than a few drops of formula in her, and when Jennifer had tried, she couldn't get her suckling either. It wasn't because she was picky of what kind of a milk she drank or from what it came out of - she simply didn't want to feed.

"Cas?" Dean muttered after he'd turned off the light again and crawled under the blanket, "She's not - she's not normal. Is that - I mean..."

"I think it's normal for her," the angel spoke quietly.  
He reached out for Dean and brought him close, although before when Dean had stayed there he'd been much too anxious to keep still for a longer while.

"Can you see her aura?"

"She's still very much alive, Dean. I'll let you know the moment you need to worry. Try to calm down."

It was much easier said than done, but Dean attempted to at least shut up for a minute. He even managed to close his eyes, but he couldn't get lost in the steady beating of the angel's heart; that was the sound he'd often fallen asleep to when nothing else had given him peace. Now, suddenly, it wasn't the angel that his world was revolving around.  
He shivered and pushed his face deeper into the male's chest. Castiel's fingers appeared in his hair and stroked the strands still wet from the shower he'd taken earlier.

"Is Mary Cassandra too long?" Dean mumbled into his skin.

"Dean, I swear, if you do not stop thinking you will hurt yourself."

"I guess it's too long, and I can't call you both Cas."

 

* * *

 

The next morning dawned with the wake-up light set on the table to make up for real sunlight in the underground room. Dean opened an eye at it and stared at the slowly increasing brightness. Next to him, Castiel seemed to be asleep - not that he could have truly slept, but the act was quite impressive. Dean curled up closer to him and hid his head from the light. Perhaps ten minutes later he woke up to the fact that he simply could not escape the fake sun anymore, and with a jump of excitement and a wave of anxiety he slid out of the bed and approached the crib.  
  
Castiel readjusted on the bed to get a better view to the show. When Dean looked at him, he wore that calm expression of fond curiosity; it made Dean want to flick him off.  
  
The baby was asleep - she breathed quiet and calm but unlike a day before when her body had been empty, she moved occasionally, fingers bending softly against the palm, legs twitching or mouth imitating the suckling reflex that had been all but absent the day before. At least her body was aware of how to do it.

"Cas?"

"Yes, Dean?"

Castiel stood up from the bed and stepped into his jeans before coming to the crib. He sat on the chair that Dean had brought next to it and caressed the forehead and the thin dark hair of the sleeping child.

"She can't just - ditch the body, can she?"

A faint smile crossed Castiel's lips.  
"No," he said, "she's bound to it like you are. Not completely quite yet, I don't think - if someone should cut her now, I believe the grace would still be removable. But once the flesh has adjusted to her, then she will be that flesh."

Dean covered a yawn and sat on Castiel's lap - the angel let out a surprised grunt and moved to better support the other's weight on him. Both of Dean's remained feet firmly on the ground so that only a little of the whole of his weight rested upon Castiel, yet the closeness felt good and relaxing and a lot better as an option than standing or kneeling.

"What does she look like - to you?" Dean asked after a moment of silence.

"I don't know. I've never seen anything quite like her. When I saw a nephil before, it didn't appear any different from a human soul, not until I could feel the aura - not before she attacked. I suppose she'll grow to hide her form as well."

"Do you think I should take her out if we go grab some coffee now?"

"No," Castiel replied, "Let her rest."

It was still early; from the direction of Sam and Jennifer's bedroom Dean could hear Henry crying, so he expected they'd get at least some company before long when they hit the kitchen and found it empty. Castiel set him by the table and went to make coffee for them and more; it was one of the things he'd gotten quite good at, so Dean didn't have to worry the kitchen would end up charred and partially melted because of him. Not that Castiel would have had any trouble undoing a minor mishap like a kitchen fire, but it tended to depress him when he failed, and Dean still hadn't figured out how to properly cheer him up and assure him that he was actually a pretty solid guy for an angel. More often than not, the small things were those that brought the other down, the things Dean didn't even think of and there were times when he ended up making fun of the other over something that would eventually come haunt him in terrible ways. It was ridiculous how well Castiel dealt with his past mistakes and all the pain he'd caused and trauma he'd suffered, yet something like a failed meal could as well have been the end of the world. Perhaps it was just that the weight of the rest was so heavy on him that every little addition to it was a great burden to bear, but Dean was rather fond of it. There was a strange disbalance in the angel - on one hand, he was an efficient killing machine and a brilliant commander in war, the very essence of calm in the face of whatever would come at him, and his patience could have outlasted that of a mountain. On the other, he was an angel with no faith in himself nor in his abilities or worth as an individual on his own, and he had very little trust in others to see value in him as anything else than a weapon or a tool. Sometimes Dean still didn't know if he quite believed in what he had with Dean, but Dean himself had bad days when he truly couldn't find himself worth the affection of those near him and as a result genuinely started believing they could not in fact love him like they said they did. That inside somewhere, they all still believed him a burden just like he believed himself to be.  
In that, he and Castiel were exactly the same.

"I spent the night thinking," the angel announced as he brought Dean a cup of steaming hot fresh coffee, "about her name."

"Yeah?"

They moved from the kitchen to the study, occupying the chairs that faced the room and left only long rows of bookshelves behind them - a paranoid habit Dean wasn't certain if he'd rubbed onto Castiel too, or if the other had always been like him in that aspect as well.

"Mary would be in honour of your mother, if I know you at all."

"You know me," Dean huffed, sipping his coffee with a smile, "So?"

"It is a tradition, right? To name your child after lost loved ones."  
The angel was aiming for something really carefully and slowly, and his insecurity amused Dean a little.

"Kind of an old-fashioned thing, really," he said with a shrug, "But yeah, it's a tradition, and if you have a name - any name - then damn, let me hear it."

Castiel seemed embarrassed and uncomfortable, but also a little excited: Dean could see it in the way his eyes flickered towards him and how he couldn't quite stay still. It wasn't the discomfort that made him move but rather the shyness and fear of embarrasment. Perhaps that had from the start been the reason he'd avoided taking part in the conversation and was only now bringing up the subject, or maybe he'd really just figured it out during the night.

"Come on, out with it."

"Anael. She was a commander above me before falling - in lead of the garrison."

"I remember her."  
Dean did.  
"Better as Anna, though. Liked her more that way too."

Castiel lowered his gaze. For a moment, Dean wondered if he'd offended - or if Castiel was suddenly recalling the fact that Dean had in fact slept with her, amongst other things.

"It may not have looked like that to you, but we were once close. She offered me her help, her guidance, something I longed for more than anything, yet I turned her down and then betrayed her, simply because I was too blind to see the truth. I know better now, but it's a mistake I can't undo."

"Yeah," Dean muttered, drowning in his coffee, "I guess the lot of you forget pretty often that you're not actually the angel who invented free will."

"Her erasure was quite throughout," Castiel replied with a sigh, "If there is one thing that angels are good at, it's spreading propaganda."  
He sipped his coffee and looked at the bookshelves surrounding them as if searching for something.  
"Anna is a common name - she wouldn't stand out. Yet, the name is one that holds meaning to me, and you asked me for contribution. This may as well be it."  


* * *

 

Anna wasn't waking up. Castiel held her in his arms, fingers over her forehead again, then traced her whole body with his palm. Dean tried to stop panicking - there was nothing on earth that could harm the child when Castiel was there. Angels were beings of power so unlimited that Castiel had rebuilt Dean's whole body from nothing but scraps before: he'd picked the girl up reminding Dean of the fact that while she was different, she couldn't possibly suffer of an ailment that he wouldn't be able to heal.  
Yet Dean's mind raced around the one and the same circle. Had they done something wrong with the ritual, was the vessel too weak or somehow flawed? Would she be alright? What if she wasn't, and there was nothing Castiel could do but let her go?

Finally the hunter sat down.  
"Calm the fuck down," he muttered to himself, prompting but a glance from the older.

In a long moment's time, Castiel lifted one arm from around the baby and took Dean's hand instead.  
"She'll be fine, Dean," he said again, an empathetic smile on his face, trying to talk to his rational side if it still existed, "There is nothing wrong with her body and her aura... it's radiant."

"Sometimes they just - sometimes they just die."  
If Dean hadn't been stuck with his own thoughts, he would have judged them absolutely ridiculous without hesitation. Some part of him still knew he was being dense and kicking up a storm out of nothing, but this was important - more important than anything in his life. This was _his child_ , the only one he'd ever have with the angel next to him. Nothing was more precious, nothing could ever be.

"She is not human, Dean. She will not just die. I promise you that."  
A quiet chuckle escaped the older. He brought his hand back to caress the sleeping girl's face and Dean raised his eyes to Castiel instead of her. Momentarily his worries were brushed aside by the calm joy on the other's features: he'd never seen Castiel look at anything like he was now looking at Anna.

"We've given her an unprecedently good start, Dean - no other nephil has ever had a body of her own from the very beginning. They're born fighting; born _to_ fight. Anna was not, and all the energy she has in her that she got from me is still there, stored to keep her healthy and growing instead of protecting her from another's essence."

"So why won't she wake up? Or eat?" 

Castiel shrugged. He pushed his index finger inside the baby's fist and tugged it up - instinctively, the fingers wrapped tighter around his and she held on until her arm was straight and Castiel lowered it again. When it rested on her side, he pulled his finger away from the grip of the once more loose fingers.  
  
"I think she's getting used to being an individual, Dean."  
The angel raised his eyes to Dean and smiled, and his smile kept widening until it reached up to his eyes and lit them up. He looked down again and seemed like he might laugh or tear up from the unexpected wave of emotion that had taken a hold of him. Dean watched him in awe and reached to brush his stubbled cheek, prompting a glance from him again. They kissed - it was a lingering, simple kiss that held inside a lot of longing and hope. 

"It's hard to suddenly find yourself human one day," Castiel added, and Dean knew he was talking from experience, "regardless of how you become one. Give her time."

 

* * *

 

Anna slept for three days. Dean stayed with her from the evening of the first day to the point of the third where he fell asleep on the chair and Castiel picked him up and buried him under two blankets on the bed, curling up around him protectively to both keep him comfortable and there in the first place. The angel managed to convince him back to sleep by reassuring him over and over again that everything was alright - that from where they now lay, he could see her aura still. He described the colours of it and the multiple ways it was active, telling him how it expanded the tiniest bit at a time but surely and steadily, explained how it meant she was growing stronger each minute, not weaker. He told him of human children, how much she was alike yet how much stronger she already was, and he noted the shades of his own grace along the golden light that she radiated. The purple, he said, was still in there, too; that it was what Dean had given her, although Castiel didn't know what it meant.

That was what Dean fell asleep listening to.  
What he woke up to was a scream. 

He jumped up, knocking Castiel on the chin with his head as he did so. His heart raced in his throat as he stumbled down from the bed and barely managed to grab a hold of the chair to keep himself upright, but he struggled around it and got back on his feet. The chair was knocked over in the process but he barely noticed as his cold and sweaty fingers finally reached over the crib's edge. The moment he caught his balance in front of it, ready to pick the girl up and save her from whatever it was that was wrong, Anna stopped screaming. She blinked her bright blue eyes and let out a sound that resembled a hiccup. She had suddenly assumed a strange pose, her back arched and face ridiculously shocked at the sight of him, probably as stupefied as his own was, and they stared at one another in utter, deep silence like neither had before seen another face; then she fell limp again and resumed screaming like a banshee. 

"Christ - come on, Anna, hey. Shh. Shh."  
Dean prayed to the absent God that his arms would bear her weight. She'd somehow unwrapped herself from within the pastel pink blanket that definitely had not been picked by her parents, and Dean did his best to get it back around her as she lay rigid in his arms, shouting, choking and screaming some more.  
"Anna, baby, shh. It's okay, it's okay. I'm here. I'm here. You're safe. It's okay."  
He could barely hear himself from under the sound of her. Uncertain, he cast a look at the bed but the angel had vanished while he'd been busy trying to wake up mid-motion. 

She rested a little easier against his shoulder - the downside was that he feared his ear would go deaf before she'd stop crying. He bounced her up and down and tried to calm himself down first; she probably wouldn't feel content before he'd stopped behaving like someone was about to eat them both.  
He never stopped talking to her, despite not quite knowing what he was saying anymore: his palm rested firm against Anna's back and held her still. 

It was the first time he heard her voice. At least she had one. It was much louder than Henry's and Dean was quite certain the screaming echoed way up to his brother's bedroom. There would be little need to announce this sudden development to the other couple. They'd know.   
The hunter cast a quick look towards the door and found it ajar. Castiel had probably left through; for some reason, Dean had assumed he'd fled the scene on wings, but on a second thought, he probably hadn't. He was still trying to catch up with the situation when the angel slipped back through the open door, closed it behind him and came to them with a small smile upon his lips. Dean's eyes moved from the older's face down to the bottle he held - so that's what he'd gone off to prepare.

His smile caught hastily upon Dean's lips as well, but he had little time to have a family moment there since he was already smack in the middle of chaos instead. With a few steps he fell sitting on the bed, one hand reaching out for the bottle now that he could trust himself to hold Anna at the same time. Castiel helped him adjust her and rubbed the back of her head, fingers twirling amongst the thin, soft hair that spotted her scalp.  
  
"Here, Anna, c'mon. It's good. I can't swear on it - Cas is a terrible cook - but it'll get you full, okay?"   
Dean pressed the bottle against her lips and they parted, took the tip in, wrapped around it and the ear-breaking screaming stopped to a dull wall. She let out a muffled sound before starting to drink. The sight of it was like seeing her come to life for the first time, and Dean couldn't tear his eyes off her no matter how much he wanted to connect with Castiel, too. When he finally managed, the angel was just as awed at the sight - his fingers absently stroked her tiny ear, tracking the upper curve of it, and he smiled that stupid warm smile again that made Dean want to throw him on the bed and love him silly.  
Instead, he looked back at their daughter and laughed. 

"That was terrifying," he muttered. 

"You'll get used to it."

 

* * *

 

Dean's life was flooding with new things he enjoyed. The fear was fading slowly now that Anna behaved like a baby should; she cried constantly, filled diapers like there wasn't a stomach in her at all and she was merely a chubby magic bag that turned relatively nice-smelling things into hellpaste on the fly, and when she wasn't crying, she looked so adorable that Dean couldn't sleep no matter how tired he was. He was too excited - now it wasn't worry that kept him by her crib, it was purely the unwillingness to stop watching her exist. She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, but the best part was when Castiel was with her.  
Those two things completed him, the angel and their daughter, and when he was with them, he was whole. 

They often occupied the media room with Sam and his boy; the kid was starting to make sounds that with good imagination resembled attempted speech. He was active and explorative and liked banging things - any things - at various surfaces for the sake of it. If he had food, his favourite thing to do with it wasn't _eating_ , it was throwing it away. Sam loved him and Dean found him funny, so they mixed well; whenever Sam reached a limit with the boy's quirks, Dean could take over and laugh at them.  
The older sensed some reservations the younger held against the newcomer but he didn't blame him. Sam would learn to love Anna. For now it was enough she had Castiel and him and that with two babies in the bunker, everyone kept dropping by more often to relax in between hunts and information chase. Mrs. Tran was practically living with them now, too excited about the state of things to leave - she kept bossing Kevin around, anything to have him far from the PlayStation, and made him bring all kinds of things for the newborn girl either from inside the bunker or from the town, sometimes even from further away, in which case she always accompanied the prophet on the mission. She never asked how Anna had got there; either someone had told her, or she thought it too rude to ask. The latter seemed unlikely given that this was Linda Tran they were talking about, the lady who gladly traded overt politeness for shady secrets wherever they seemed like something she might need to know and without failure whenever the subject concerned his son in the least. Dean assumed their sudden and biologically speaking entirely unlikely multiplying was one of these things, but he didn't put himself in the line of fire if she didn't need him there: someone else could shoulder that burden for him, and clearly someone already had, voluntarily or otherwise.

The best moment of his week after Anna had finally woken from her supernatural slumber came to be in his own bedroom. He'd gone to put the girl in bed for a nap - she'd been too grumpy and irritable to fall asleep in the media room, so the bedroom would have to do, and perhaps he'd get to nap as well: Anna cried as frequently through the night as she did through the day, so sleep was barely more than a cruel joke for Dean. Good thing that he'd been trained to sleep bad his whole life, so the lack of rest hardly affected him too much, and he had learned to be the master napper in the years that he'd spent on the road hunting whichever shade of ugly was the theme of the week. Having a baby wake up hungry or soaked every so many hours was hardly as exhausting, he often reminded himself, as trying to run from one end of the monster afterlife to the other with a bunch of bloodthirsty leviathans closing in.  
So there he stood, both hands gripped by the red-faced spawn of his, leaning closer and closer and closer just to see what would happen if he did, and then, then he got just a bit too close and the baby's round eyes crossed. He pulled back to snort, startling her - she made a whiny sound but he returned above her with a smile and calming words, and for once she didn't burst out into a primal aria just for the sake of being able to do so. 

When he got close enough, she crossed her eyes again. Dean pressed a finger onto her nose and poked out his tongue, pulling back... and then she poked her tongue out, too.  
He stared.  
And then he cracked up. 

Anna let out a small sleepy huff, and her eyes crossed again before she closed them. Dean crashed on the bed and fell asleep smiling. When he woke up three hours later to Castiel crawling over him, kissing him up along his stomach, chest and neck all the way to his lips, he had to call the sex off before it begun to show him what he'd found their daughter capable of.  
Then, when she'd proved her worth, Dean knocked the angel back on the bed and took him there - but only once he was absolutely certain the baby was asleep.

 

* * *

 

**Spring**  

Castiel enjoyed breathing out thick white clouds in the chilly air. Dean followed him, watching, his hands hidden deep in the pockets of his jacket. The older had nearly walked out in nothing but a t-shirt and jeans, but Dean had refused to let him out, wordless and just giving him a demanding stare until he remembered that it was cold outside and he'd probably look less crazy in a jacket. He still wore much too little clothing but neither of them was _that_ bothered. As long as he didn't immediately stand out from the crowd he was good enough to go. It was as much for Castiel's sake as it was for Dean's peace of mind: the angel enjoyed mixing in, and Dean was finally growing content with his progress. He was definitely a slow learner.

They knew the area for miles around the bunker like it was a part of it still and sometimes the quiet was what they needed to rest. Next week they'd have the bunker all for themselves: Sam would go play a normal husband with her wife and their wobbly-walking, non-sensically conversing little miracle in front of Jen's parents. The younger brother had grown a beard and didn't seem all too willing to shave it off, so that he looked older than Dean and with his perfect manners and a flawless mask of normalcy, there was no doubt in the older brother's mind that he'd pass for the ideal man in the eyes of Jennifer's European parents no matter what would happen. The only inevitable penalty points would come from the length of his hair; with the beard, he could have fallen out from a fantasy flick. He only lacked a sword tied around his waist, and Dean had jokingly told him he could borrow one from the bunker if he truly wanted to impress.  
As a reward, his coffee had been salted. Clearly having a boy to play with had finally made the younger man chill a little, and the prank war had lasted until Jennifer had had to cut her hair due to a misplaced bubblegum.  
She hadn't spoken to Dean for a week, but truth was, she looked stunning with the new look and so Dean found himself a little hard-pressed for both sympathy and guilt.

Anna was growing fast. She was the noisiest kid Dean had ever met: the three months had put nothing but more volume in her arsenal, and she wasn't one of those who didn't like to flaunt their worst. She screamed when she was hungry, she screamed when she was bored - she screamed when she kicked aside her blanket and she screamed when she was covered with it again. Nothing pleased her.   
"Existing must be so hard," Dean often found himself saying when he couldn't figure out what in the seven hells could possibly be wrong this time, "It's so exhausting and terrible to be served like a freaking queen every day. I'll pay you good money if you shut up. Hell, I'll get you a puppy, just - just please shut up."   
She never did. Eventually Castiel would pop in from somewhere and somehow instinctively know what was wrong with her, leaving Dean feeling like he sucked with kids, when in truth it was often exactly the other way around. Castiel still made Henry cry, and Henry didn't cry much. 

Dean raised his eyes towards the sky and counted some stars, painted a lion upon the black velvet with them, and then took Castiel's hand in his own.  
 _I love you_ , the way his fingers wrapped between the older's told. 

_You are my everything_ , spoke the angel's in turn as his thumb slid along his cold skin, over and over again, gently and calmingly.

 

* * *

 

She truly was beatiful. It wasn't just Dean's biased point of view that got in the way, he knew it each time he took her from her bed and fed her, bathed her, changed her, clothed her or played with her. He knew it when she tried to pull her pudgy little body across the floor to Castiel and failed, using the disappointment as the ultimate excuse to scream again. He knew it when she stayed quiet and just stared at him with her brilliant blue eyes that seemed to contain a whole universe in them, knew it when in that stare he could see the million times Castiel had looked at him the same. It was undeniable when she turned her head, fingers slipping between her doll's lips, long lashes surrounding the milky way inside her, and her profile showed that up-turning tiny nose that would grow to be like Dean's, only smaller, thinner, prettier. She had his skin - the poor thing - and Castiel's hair, although when Dean pointed it out, the angel merely commented that his vessel was a genetic blond and would have, combined with Dean's lighter tone, most definitely produced a child of fair hair. None of that mattered. His vessel most definitely was not blond now, and the child looked like him; she had his eyes, his hair, brows that were like a midfield between the two of them. And Dean's lips. Definitely Dean's lips. He would have never admitted it, but he was glad about it; as ridiculous as they looked on his already effeminate, useless mug, they would serve her much better. On the other hand, for a boy Dean would have wished Castiel's instead. He'd gotten enough of crap treatment for his delicate features back when he'd looked a little less like a guy who'd made his way through hellfire and lived to tell the tale. For a guy, Cas had gorgeous lips, and that was just one more thing on Dean's list of things he was highly biased  _but_ objectively correct about regardless - or at the very least he had a hard time believing any sane person would think of disagreeing.

Dean was holding Anna on his knee and pretending to let her fall, causing her to yelp with glee each and every time, when Sam popped in the room. He was smiling when he knelt next to them and grabbed a firm hold of the little nephil from under her fat arms when Dean let her back - her expression was priceless when the expected fall was cut short to the giant hands of someone she'd clearly thought had disappeared entirely when she couldn't see him anymore. Her fists slid from Dean's hands as Sam pulled her up on his lap instead, and she turned her head with a worried expression as if not quite certain whether or not Sam was friendly and could be trusted.

"Dean," the younger called, barely containing the widening smile.  
He grabbed Anna's hand that reached out to pull at his beard and placed her on her belly on the carpeted floor instead, and Dean watched him with raised brows and an expression of expectation. 

"Yeah, I am?" he offered, trying to figure out what his daughter had been stolen from him for. 

Sam clearly just needed to hold something. His hand-spider crawled along the girl's back and tickled her from here and there, but his eyes were on Dean, and they sparkled.  
"I wanted to tell you before we leave - Jen gave her permission," he continued breathlessly, as if at loss for words; "She's pregnant again." 

Dean's brows climbed higher and Sam's seemed to imitate him. On the floor, Anna was looking up at him with her mouth hanging open, and she nailed the expression of surprise. Instinctively, Dean offered the pacifier to her, and the imitation of shock disappeared the very instant she had that thing in front of her again. She sucked on it loudly. _Everything_ she did had to be loud. 

"Sammy, man."  
That grin the younger had on him was contagious.  
"Do you even know what a condom is?" 

The younger laughed, embarrassed.  
"We're sure, Dean."  
He shivered excitedly when Dean patted him on the shoulder. 

"I'm happy for you," the older said, his voice warm and genuine with no hidden jealousy or pain beneath the layers anymore.  
It felt refreshing and good, like a second chance to truly be a better person; he didn't need to desire what Sam had, not anymore. This was good for them both if it made the other happy.

Sam looked down to hide his tears, and Dean knew exactly how he felt.   


	6. Fires and Foxtails

* * *

 

Dean saw the birds in his angel. Last year, they'd flown inside him and got trapped within his skin, but now there was calm and warm, a summer's eve that seemed never-ending. Inside Castiel, Dean could see the awakening. He saw it in the excitement the other expressed when Anna turned towards him and her mouth opened up in a tiny zero, turning soon to a gleeful open toothless smile as she recognised him and waved her arms about, reaching for him or slapping Dean or whoever it was that was the closest to her at the time, void of recognition of the fact.  
Excitement had always been an emotion Castiel, for the main part, lacked. There were no things that lit him up in that way, nothing that he looked forwards to and felt antsy about. Now there was.  
Anna was that thing.  
She made him so human, and Dean realised it was as much because they were learning things from one another as it was because she was the only one that expected _nothing_ from Castiel, to whom he'd never been anything but the individual he was.  
It was a notion that both saddened and calmed him. He knew Castiel would never be like that with him, that he'd never shed his shell entirely, but also that the angel was perfectly content with his family now and that nowhere was better for him than right here. He hadn't left since her birth, not for a day; no cause was more important than that which tied him to Dean.

On the horizon, a darkness lurked; it was the approaching storm that they both ignored to their best ability. They loved their little girl and she'd shown no signs of not loving them back in turn. Quite the contrary, they were her sun and her stars, the wind and the ocean in the world that rotated for her and her alone. She adored them, worshipped them; she trusted them with all her tiny being, counted on them to never let her down, and Dean swore they would not. The same pride and devotion glowed like a second halo around Castiel, but they did not control the world, not really.  
To the faceless outside their walls she was something that would have to die, one way or the other and sooner better than later. The faceless would not care about her sweetness, her beauty, her youth, they would not care about her family. The only thing keeping the faceless at bay was secrecy and the legends spun around Dean, Sam and the fallen angel Castiel. Those legends did not prevent the craziest, most violent of the lot. Dean had faced them before.  
It was a cruel world they'd brought her in, but here within their walls, she was safer than she would ever be again.

Castiel smiled at her.  
"Aa," she said. "Aa-a."  
He caught her and plodded her around to face Dean - Dean found himself with a crooked smile, already reaching in to hold her.

"Ee."

"Yeah, it's me, baby. I got you."

Castiel chuckled.  
"She'll never learn my name."

Dean's eyes flickered towards him, a spark playing in them.  
"She will - one day," he poked, winking, but turned serious soon after, "I don't think she has the faintest clue that she's associating the letters with us."

"She definitely is," Kevin noted from the table.  
Last time Dean had checked, he'd been forehead-first against the tablet, looking so throughoutly done with it that it was a miracle he hadn't thrown it to the bin. Again.  
"Except that I think I'm an u. That's all she ever says when I'm around. Uu-uu."

"She thinks you're weird, Kev. No offense but you look a little different from the rest of us."

Kevin chuckled.  
"Yeah, yeah. At least she doesn't scream every time I walk in the room anymore."  
He pretended to adjust the tablet, but Dean heard him mutter something about racist babies under his breath and saw the wink that he cast in their direction.

 

* * *

 

**Summer**

Castiel had no choice but to go. He came to the bedroom for the last time to hold Anna, who sensed his anxiety and started crying. Dean ignored her and instead hugged his angel tight and for a good long while: Anna was pressed between them, and the comfort of their embrace calmed her down before the hug broke.  
It was prolonged by the grieving kisses Dean was planting along the older's jaw, on his neck and under his ear, and when he finally retreated, Castiel had closed his eyes and his lips were parted. Anna was staring up at him with her usual wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression.

"It's like I'm leaving for good," the angel muttered with a small smile of irony when he had gathered himself from the bliss and started peering at Dean through the wish for hasty continuation, for further lingering and affection.

"Don't get killed, Cas."

"I'm not that clumsy anymore."  
They kissed. When they tried to part, Anna had grabbed a hold of Dean's shirt. Castiel passed her onto him and stood up.  
"Pray to me, Dean."

"Send me a goddamn text every now and then and I will," Dean grimaced.  
The overcoat-wrapped angel gave him a sad smile and with that and the sound of large wings hitting the air, he was gone.

Anna yawned. She didn't understand the disappearing. She only understood it was past her bed time - which was whenever she felt like it - and that Dean was warm and safe there next to her.  
It was then that Dean noticed it for the first time; when she peered at him sleepily, her eyes seemed to emit a silvery glow. Dean brushed her cheek and adjusted her, but when he got her to a better position to see, the light was gone. Strangely unsettled by it in his unwelcome solitude, he pressed the girl against his chest and fell down on the bed. He made a loose nest for her between the pillows that had somehow multiplied from the one he'd brought in to a full total of four during the years he'd shared the bed with Castiel. Anna didn't mind where she slept as long as it was near him or in her crib, and even in her crib the preferred state of things was Dean:  
she'd already fallen asleep by the time he laid her down in the space and brought his arm around her so that it'd be impossible for her to even try and roll off, just like it'd be impossible for him to accidentally roll on her.

"Cas," he breathed out to the empty room, "we have a crazy life, don't we?"

 

* * *

 

Anna learned to set things on fire before she learned to crawl right, and that was the moment Dean realised just how little control he had over the girl's future and just how much of it depended on herself. She would grow older, bigger, stronger - if she was burning the media room's carpet today, what would she be doing tomorrow?  
He drank his coffee, hoping that the carpet would be the only thing she'd ever burn. He'd already prayed twice since the incident and even called Castiel once, although unsurprisingly, his phone was dead. It was more than likely that the angel's phone did not even exist at the present moment - in Heaven, Castiel did not wear a vessel, and even if he did, Dean's prepaid wasn't expensive enough to cover long-distance calls of that scale.

At first he hesitated to tell Sam, but what else he could do? The others had to know. He not only owed them to tell, they _deserved_ to know, and on top of it, perhaps they could help him. Or rather, perhaps they'd be willing to try.  
Once Anna was asleep, he slipped out of the bedrooom as quietly as he could and started scouting the bunker. The corridors seemed longer and wider today, like they'd stretched while he'd slept, and Sam had vanished somewhere inside. From the study, Dean found Jennifer and Charlie instead.

"Charlie," he called with a surprised grin.  
The woman hopped up immediately and hung herself over Dean's shoulders, hugging him tight.  
"Hey."

"Hey," she breathed out excitedly, "How are you?"

"I'm - good - have you guys seen Sam?"

Jennifer nodded.  
"He was reading in our bedroom twenty minutes ago, and I'd bet my life on it that that's what he's still at. Henry's sleeping, so don't enter with a scene."

Dean ran his hand through Charlie's hair and patted her back, eyes on Jennifer.  
"Do I ever?" he asked with a wink and turned to leave. "Charlie?"

"Yeah?"

"I want to hear everything about _that_ thing."

"What thing? Oh, _that_ thing..."  
Charlie chuckled.  
"Sure, yeah, drag your sorry ass to the media room and I'll tell you everything, all the dirty details."  
She sat back down and exchanged looks with Jennifer.  
"I was on a hunt. A vamp nest. Nothing actually dirty."

Dean was about to leave the room.  
"There _was_ a girl, though!"

"It wasn't dirty!"

Dean returned to the living quarters, passed his bedroom slowly to hear if Anna was making any sounds but, as was usual now, she was sleeping soundly, so he carried on further until Sam's larger (and finally - _finally_ \- fully unpacked and decorated) bedroom. He knocked sternly on the door to let him know it was him and that he intended to enter the room.  
"You need to stop playing with yourself, Sam, because we have to talk."

"It's good, come in."

Dean pushed open the door and found Sam sitting on the bed, a thick book spread on his lap, and the younger was looking at him with an expression of curiosity and mild worry. Dean didn't invade his space unless they really _did_ need to talk.  
"Do you want me to sit on your bed? Really?"

"Oh, come on."

Dean smiled, as the attempted grimace never happened the way he'd wanted. He hopped on the opposite end of the bed, thinking vaguely that it was a lot softer than his bed and subsequently how on earth could anyone sleep in a bed that tried to swallow them at contact.  
His eyes scanned the plain walls, stopping over Henry's tall wood-coloured cot inside which the one-year-old was sleeping. He looked huge in comparison to Anna, but Anna was big for her age as well. Everyone in their family seemed to be.

"Everything alright?" Sam asked, seemingly finding Dean unable to start on his own.

"Not really," the older said with a shrug, "or, man, I don't know. It's about Anna."

Sam huffed.  
"When isn't it?"

Dean wasn't sure if he referred to the way he tended to overreact to everything, as he still did; every fall was a broken bone, each cry a sign of something being horribly wrong. It was stressful for him but seemed to amuse Sam, perhaps because Dean had been like that with him as well. At least with Anna he didn't cover it up with "come on, man up" when she was genuinely hurt - he'd grown enough to show that he got scared, too.  
He shook his head and bit the bullet.  
"No, this is different. I swear. She didn't swallow anything moldy this time. It's not that. It's - it's the thing."

Sam raised a brow.  
"The thing?"

"Sam, she's not human. And she burned a hole into the floor today."

That took the amusement out of the younger.  
"Okay," he said then.

Dean stared.  
"Okay?"

"Okay."  
Sam closed the book and started gnawing on his lower lip.  
"And Cas is MIA?"

"Yeah. I think he's coming home soon, but yeah, he's still MIA." 

"Nice. Good timing." 

"I know. It's not like I can tell her to stop, either. I don't think she gets that she's doing it, or anything. I don't think she gets fire is bad. Sam, I don't think fire _is_ bad for her. She had her hand in it and survived. It didn't seem to burn, the skin got blistered but healed and - and I don't know. It was crazy. I'm also probably in shock because I'm being way, way, <i>way</i> too cool about this."  
The full truth was that Dean wasn't cool about it. He was frozen solid with worry and a twinge of genuine fear had made home inside his chest, but he was also afraid of saying any of it out loud. The need to protect Anna was stronger than any other drive in him, and while he'd by now accepted that no one was going to drive her through with a blade as long as she was still his kid, the instinct was difficult to fight even with the aid of logic and trust. Perhaps that was the main reason he was here with Sam, and not so much the fact that Sam was the second most well-informed individual in the bunker, falling second only to Castiel, when it came to knowledge about anything and everything supernatural. If there was one drive that could ever come close to Dean's protectiveness over Anna, it was the whole of what he had with his brother. They'd been through more difficult things than this.

Sam frowned. His eyes moved slowly across the room, finally stopping at Henry. He watched him and his frown deepened, then suddenly dissolved in a weary chuckle.  
"Sometimes I think he's difficult." 

"Yeah, like Anna wasn't difficult enough without powers."

"Maybe it was a one-off thing." 

"Do you really think it was?"

"No. But I think - for now - it's better to treat it as that."  
Sam looked at him again and attempted a smile. Dean tried to respond in kind.  
"How's the floor?" 

"What? Oh. Oh, the floor's - fine - it's good. It wasn't a big fire or anything."

A hint of a grimace crossed the younger's features.  
"Man."

"Yeah. Welcome to Stephen King," Dean uttered gravelly.

"Yep."

 

* * *

 

Castiel placed the girl on the grass and settled beside her. Dean leaned over to pick up a tall thick green foxtail off of its roots, then sat down with them: he tickled the girl's pointy nose with the fluffy end, making her reach in to grab the strange tickly object. When she had it, she started eating it and tearing it apart.  
The angel brought his hand around Dean's waist and Dean laid his head over his shoulder, letting out a heavy sigh of relief. At least he was here now. A little battered-looking, a little stressed out, but here. Living with a kid like theirs was infinitely easier when he could share it with someone as calm and controlled as Castiel was - someone who could put out a fire with a wave of his hand. Even a fire started by a nephil, he'd assured Dean.  
Yet he seemed concerned, and Dean definitely did not blame him. 

Anna was wearing a blue dress, her baby form looking rather ridiculous stuffed inside something so pretty. It was even a little large for her still, but in a couple months it'd be too small, so it was good enough for Dean now.  
The trees framed the beach for them - ahead, the lake lapped gently at the shoreline and dock. If it had crossed his mind earlier, Dean would have brought his fishing equipment.  
  
Suddenly, a quiet laugh escaped him. Castiel turned to look at him with an expression of mild surprise. 

"Can you believe it's been six months since I last hunted _anything_?" he asked, baffled himself, "Seems like the Winchesters are retiring. God, I miss killing things." 

"Don't jinx it," Castiel huffed.  
He placed his palm gently against Anna's chest and pushed her on her back, from where she promptly sat up again, chasing his fingers. 

"How's heaven?" 

"Chaotic."

"Nice." 

"Not really."  
The angel had a smile on him, however. He watched Anna keenly, finger reaching up to her face and pressing against her lips. She grabbed it and tried to shake it, but Castiel's hand was far too firm for her to affect, so he simply moved it along to give her a sense of achievement.  
"She's very beautiful," he said for the fiftieth time. 

"Can you still see her aura?" Dean asked, his hand in Castiel's hair now.  
He hadn't even changed out of his trench and formal wear yet. 

"Very well. It's peculiar," the older replied, "strong for her age and keen to connect. She's not holding back - she wants to know us and connect to us."  
His smile was widening.  
"The purple colour is - it's getting more vivid, developing shades. I think it may be her colour in the end. I haven't seen... usually everyone is born with a colour. Henry had a grey-blue aura from birth. Sam has a multi-colour aura, and I don't know how it happened; yours is like living fire." 

"Do you have one?"

"I do. It's silver. Angels are simple and boring, we carry auras that represent our rank and special skills. I am a seraph, and specialise in field mission and combat. A Rit Zien has a red or purple aura, an archangel would have a golden one. They're not of any particular interest. I gave Anna the silvery shade, and I'm happy to see it go." 

Dean smiled absently.  
"Cas?" he muttered, planting a kiss on the older's jaw, "Could you lie down?" 

"I could."  
And he did. Dean followed him down on the safe side - Anna was already reaching to grab Castiel's face and coat, because when people got on her level, everything was fair game. Dean brought his arm around the older's stomach and poked at their girl to distract her, and as expected, she started examining his hand instead of bothering Cas. 

"There's something I need to ask. Which... the fire reminded me about. She's half an angel, so does that mean she can hurt you, too?" 

Castiel let out a small sound.  
"Yes," he replied simply, seriously but in a neutral manner that didn't imply anything.  
It was the voice he used for stating facts, like that yes, sometimes meteors did fall to earth, and it was neither something that he expected happening soon nor anything that definitely couldn't.  
Yes, the apocalypse was set in stone, but apparently stone could be broken.  
Yes, God existed - there was even still a small chance of Him caring about them.  
No, dinner was not ready yet. It might or might not be soon. It might even get destroyed, stolen or spoiled before anyone would be eating it. 

In a similar way, his response did not exactly answer Dean's question in full, even if it explicitly did, and even if Castiel himself knew what the hidden meaning had been or if there was one in the first place. Neither of them could predict if Anna would, in fact, hurt either of them. It was likely that she would, most supernatural beings took their time learning to control their power, but that wasn't the kind of hurt Dean was worried about. He could take a beating - Cas could even bring him back from the dead should their creation accidentally wipe him from the face of the earth, which Dean considered unlikely for a child. And Castiel himself, he was an experienced angel. He was and would more likely than not stay much stronger than Anna for the time it would take her to come to control her strength.  
  
But would she eventually _want_ to hurt them?  
  
Dean didn't know. Castiel couldn't tell. Anna, as she was now, definitely did not seem to wish harm upon them.   
She was trying to eat grass again, but the taste didn't appear appealing to her if Dean could tell by her tortured expression. For some reason, she was still going on. She often did that, like turning back from a bad idea was an insult to her pride. She'd chosen to eat the grass, so she would.  
"What kind of a cow are you?" Castiel muttered, replacing the blade of grass with her pacifier. 

Anna seemed content with the trade and didn't start screaming. After all, should she grow tired of the rubber, there was grass all over the place - the fact Castiel had taken from her the disgusting one didn't mean there weren't options readily available for her.

 

* * *

 

**Autumn**

In his dream, Dean kept waking up in his bed to a sound resembling a whirlpool raging in the garage. He'd follow it out of the bedroom, calling for Castiel quietly under his breath, but Castiel wouldn't respond. The corridor would be unrealistically long with tens of extra rooms on each side; some doors would be wide open and the furniture inside as well as all the decorations and belongings of those living inside would be broken, torn and scattered all over the place like a fight had occurred. Seeing that made him feel terrified: like in dreams often happened, he simply _knew_ that the occupants were dead, and the thought was horrible and sad, because although he didn't really know who these people were, he knew they were very dear to him.  
One woman's name in particular kept reappearing, one he could never recall afterwards when he'd truly woken up, but in the dream he'd keep repeating it, barely voicing it out of fear that something else would hear him instead. 

The sound of the whirlpool would grow stronger the closer to the garage he would get. Then, when he'd see the doors, they would be open wide and the cars would be gone. In the middle of the room would stand an ebony-haired woman holding up her hand, still like a statue facing away from him, and in front of her on the floor would be a pile of corpses leaking lavender-scented blue-green liquid and blood. 

"It's your fault," a hissing voice would speak into his right ear, and he'd know it was her speaking.  
For no reason that he could point out, the voice would scare him cold and make him tear up, make him wish it would end, the way in a dream he often could _feel_ the way out but not quite reach up to it. 

"It's your fault, it's your fault, it's your fault, it's all -"

She'd start turning and often at this point, Dean would shout _no_ and beg for her to not turn, because he did not want to see. She would keep turning for a good while, repeating that it was all his fault, that he was to blame, that he would be next, that he would be next, that he would be... and then he'd see Castiel, bloodied, behind her. Castiel would be holding something wrapped in a blanket and looking at him and open his mouth but say nothing and turn to stare down at the blanket instead.  
  
And then she'd be right in front of him, staring at him with the face of the shtriga, and he'd wake up. 

"Dean," Castiel muttered and pulled his shaking body against himself, "Dean, it's alright. You're safe. It was just a dream."

Consciously, Dean knew it was just a dream and that everything Castiel told him was true. Although his words gave him comfort in that moment, they didn't take away the fear which the dream left inside him nor did they take away the _cause_ of the dreams; nothing could, nothing but perhaps time, and time was a sluggish thing that did not bend to the will of any human. Especially not to that of Dean Winchester's.  
"It's always that same damn dream," he muttered, standing up on his shaking pair of legs and wobbling to the crib. 

Anna slept soundly, but when he reached in to pick her up, her forehead creased and she looked very uncomfortable until he was holding her tight against his chest. Castiel made room for them when he re-entered the bed with her, and with a sigh, Dean adjusted to sit against him, leaning his head and side to the angel's body. 

"You love her very much," Castiel spoke after a while had passed in silence with Dean fighting the sleepiness that he still wasn't ready to allow to take control of him.  
  
At the words he glanced towards the older, raising brows.   
"Of course I love her, she's my kid."  
He smirked a little and brought one hand from Anna's legs to Castiel's face instead. After yawning, he brushed that hand from behind Castiel's ear into his hair and looked back at the sleeping girl on his lap.  
Castiel had brought his hand over her too - he held it over her chest and caressed her restful face with an expression of concentration and thoughtfulness.  
"Don't you?" Dean asked him in turn. 

Castiel nodded.  
"I would have never thought that one day, I would raise a child - with a human, no less. In the most abstract scenario, I could have pictured myself taking care of a human child, but not with a partner of my own. In no case would I have even allowed myself the thought of this; of creating a child of my own, with a man I love. Such things do not belong to angels." 

"And you're happy?"  
Dean really didn't know. Castiel didn't talk much about his feelings and in the end, Dean didn't either. He also didn't poke around too often, believing important things would be said and the rest would come only if the other wished to share them. Sometimes he wished Castiel would have shared more. 

For a moment, the angel thought; his face was calm and relaxed if not for the occasional twitch of his brows or the squint of his eyes. Then he sighed and smiled; he pushed aside Dean's arm from around Anna and took her in his lap instead. This time the girl didn't even move, as if she'd been more than content to be held by him.

"Sometimes I fear," Castiel finally spoke, "for her sake and our own. Her future is very uncertain. You may feel like we're living a complicated phase now, but it's nothing in comparison to what will come when she becomes more aware and discovers her powers."

Dean looked away. His room didn't comfort him like it had used to anymore, lacking the safety that it had brought him for years, the isolation from the world that wanted to break him and hurt those he loved. After Anna, feeling safe meant worrying, whether it was about an uncertain vicious force outside those walls or something that resided within them. Often enough it was something mundane, like whether the sounds the girl was making were just sounds or if she had an upset stomach, or if her behaviour was a result of a badly slept night or the sign of a rising fever.  
Most the time, Dean needed worrying to keep breathing. Perhaps the dreams were simply a sign of this catching up with him. Regardless, it made him feel uneasy to know Castiel shared his fears; that made them too real when all he tried was to forget them. 

"But mostly," the angel continued, and Dean raised his head in surprise as he hadn't expected him to, "mostly I feel happy. I've never felt as good as I do when I'm here with you, when I can hold her and watch her grow."  
Castiel's eyes turned towards the ceiling like he was counting stars, and Dean's followed.  
"What we did to create her... I can't regret it when I hold her. I can't not see how she completes you, and... Dean, I wish I could tell you how I feel when I'm with her, but I don't have the words. It's beyond what I can express, beyond what I thought I could feel. Just holding her now makes me feel like..."

"Like you're going to burst." 

"In the metaphorical sense, yes. Like I'm expanding from the inside and at the same time, like I can't bring my vessel to breathe, like something's holding me so tight I can barely stand it. It's a good kind of pain that I feel, and a dizziness I don't think I want to stop." 

"That's called love, Cas." 

"There are many forms of it," Castiel noted with a cryptic smile.

Dean felt himself blushing.   
"I'm going back to sleep now. Idiot."


	7. Anna

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “She is so lovely she could kill you without you even noticing it. A monster girl who knows when to kiss and when to kill.”  
>  _\- Cameron Jace: Snow White Sorrow_  
> 

* * *

 

They could willfully ignore the warning signs for as long as they wished, and the rest of the bunker liked to play along. Yet, the manner Anna's interests seemed to be less about exploration and more about destruction, and the way she showed affection only when she required something and then turned unresponsive, even apathetic, to interaction once she'd got what she'd needed, was worrysome. Where Henry had always loved to figure out how things worked and even at Anna's age had partaken in interactive play such as hide and seek or the more casually played "where did the object go?", Anna seemed annoyed by obstacles and distraction. She liked figuring out how she could break things, or at least how to best hurl them at others. Her attempts to cause pain, as rare as they were in the larger scale of things, seemed deliberate and instinctive.  
Dean felt sick most the time when it happened, knowing the child didn't have the capability to understand enough yet to learn that this was wrong, yet in combination with the potential awakening of her powers... it was a risk he hadn't allowed himself to think of.

There were things Dean believed in, facts that he'd accepted as laws of life. Amongst those things was that some beings were born evil. He'd been told more than often enough that nephilim fell neatly into that category, that they were by nature what Charlie referred to as "chaotic evil" in D&D terms.  
Charlie loved her RPG categories and Dean couldn't help but agree that often enough, they were the simplest way to phrase things. However, this was the point where he simply refused to listen.

After Anna was put to bed each evening, he spent hours huddled over their notes and research, trying to sum up something of importance from along the seemingly plain timeline in contrast to the lore he knew, in truth not so much seeking a pattern as seeking an _exception_ from it. He spent lengthy, exhausting days figuring out what the smiles meant, if all of them were genuine or if none of them were, and where he found the genuine ones, trying to find a reason that could make them not so, then the other way around when he was quite certain there was a hidden meaning, a goal, behind them.

"You work too hard, Dean," Castiel mumbled.  
He slid his palms over the younger's tense shoulders and pressed, making the other sigh in pain. The sigh turned into a submissive whine as the angel's fingers grabbed a hold of the muscles and massaged them, as even as light as the pressure was, it still hurt.  
"You should take some time off."

Dean leaned back to the male's body, his head landing softly on the older's abdomen. He brushed against it and let out another sigh, this one small and more comfortable as the rubbing motion the angel was still holding up started to relax him.  
"I'm trying to make sense of this, I just... I can't seem to understand - her."

Castiel nodded. Dean looked at him from below and smiled before closing his eyes.  
"She's a stubborn child."

"It's more than just that."

Castiel nodded again. His fingertips pressed onto Dean's neck and the muscles he rubbed felt solid like joints. Increased bloodflow made the taller feel slightly nauseous and dizzy, and he could feel the familiar throbbing of an incoming headache, too. He did need a break, if for nothing else, then just to get some oxygen back in his brain, as clearly he was hardly having any of it at this stage. As Castiel's thumbs pressed into his flesh on both sides of his spine and joined the movement, the younger began letting out small whimpers, trying his best to relax but failing often as the pain caused quite the distraction.  
"Dean."

"Mm?"

"Come."

Castiel turned and walked to the bed. He sat on it to watch Dean heavily pull himself up and follow. Once the hunter was settled, he guided him down on his back and got on him, knees pressed against his thighs and hands next to his shoulders, locking him down where he'd landed. Dean didn't pretend he wasn't into it: he raised his chin to expose his neck with a small sound of pleasure escaping through. His back was already arching into the angel's touch when the other pushed his palm under his shirt and leaned in to kiss him on the side of his neck.

"Cas?"

"Yes?"  
The word came as a subtle burst of air against the freshly-kissed skin, making Dean tense up and whimper again.

"Take me. Make me forget. Please."  
The tip of Castiel's nose brushed along his neck and jaw until they were face to face: the kiss they shared was half-hearted and light but felt reassuring to Dean regardless of the hasty manner it was given and received.

"That was my intention."

 

* * *

 

For a while, Anna had taken most of both Dean and Castiel's attention and pulled it away from one another and their own relationship, but this became a routine: to relieve one another's stress and to take the weight of the day off of each other's shoulders, they started making love more often than they had since the first couple months of their relationship. What they did and how they did it, through what goals and towards which ends all depended on the day and the mood of both of them; frustration and fear was taken out through fast, aggressive and competitive sex, whereas exhaustion and the need to be just held was better relieved through a more lengthy manner, sometimes with neither of them reaching climax in hours or even aiming for it at all. Sometimes just wasting time close together under a blanket in the dark, fingers tracing whichever part of the other they landed upon, was the only thing they had energy for. Dean had long ago figured out how good submitting felt: when life was screwing him over, there was this one safe place he could return to and hand in all of his responsibilities to the one being that would carry him through thick and thin without breaking. And in turn, when he felt he'd lost control, Castiel was where he found it again - one of his favourite things was to push the older's chest into the mattress, pull up his hips and take him from behind, because in this position he knew exactly when he was doing him good. The angel would slowly relax into a state where he gave up his divinity in exchange for pleasure and the feeling of connection, trusting Dean to keep him safe even if he was fully rooted in his vessel at the time. It became visible in the odd but fascinating manner the muscles of his back began mirroring the movements of the form that Dean's eyes were too dull to perceive: they twitched and pulsed as the angel moved his wings which, as he put it in his own words, were often half-spread from the bed to the floor. He'd make sounds so needy and submissive that just hearing that was often enough to make Dean come, and feeling his release was something Castiel took great pleasure in. All of this was good: all of it brought them closer and offered them a way out of the uncertainty of whatever the next day would bring in its wake.

Meanwhile, Jennifer's pregnancy was moving along to its last trimester, almost unnoticed by the couple so consumed by their own world. As such it came as a shock to Dean to hear when he walked into the kitchen one morning, half-oblivious to anything that wasn't Anna biting his shoulder in demand for breakfast, that Sam was taking her to the hospital.  
  
"She's not due yet, is she?" he asked and added a frustrated 'ow' to the end of the sentence, trying to somehow gently push his teething and suddenly cannibalistic daughter somewhere away from his flesh.

Sam raised a brow at him, leaning to the counter with a coffee cup lifted to his lips.  
"No," he replied, "but her blood pressure's up and something was off with the tests. The baby's doing fine, but it's just in case."

Dean frowned a little as he nodded. He attempted to put Anna on the floor but she started shrieking the moment he lowered her - nothing unusual. Sam chuckled.  
"Slept well?" he asked.

"Actually yeah," Dean grunted in response, raising the kid back on his chest, "Full seven hours - could you - please - make her something? Anything."

"Sure. I remember Henry at that age."

"Good, because I'd be worried if you didn't. It was just a couple months ago. Damn, Anna, please, just _stop_."  
The last part of the sentence was half-cooing, half-desperate. The choice of words made Sam laugh, although as Dean sat down and tricked Anna into gnawing at her pacifier instead, he saw that the younger looked very tired and worried as he prepared a baby-appropriate mix from the contents of their now comfortably sizable refridgerator. At first it had been awfully large for just the three of them, especially considering one of the three counted didn't eat to begin with, but the more people settled in - the more kids they kept popping out - the better the size served their needs.  
  
"You don't look like you even got your four."

Sam glanced at him, then turned back to pick up the fruit-rice combination he'd prepared and walked to Dean. He laid it in front of the man, not quite fast enough to avoid Anna's grasping fingers that landed on his shirt and caught a hold, so he had to untangle himself before sitting down next to them.  
  
"You're welcome," he yawned, pressing a hand over his mouth and releasing his freshly-filled cup of coffee on the table far enough for it to remain his. "I did get four hours. Thing is, Dean, I'm not cut out for that anymore. I'd need more like six."

"Wow," Dean huffed, "You need to get back in shape."  
He eyed the younger somewhat worried, but apparently service wasn't up to standard and Anna started making noise again, so he returned to shoveling food in her tiny mouth instead and tried not to get the most of it on her chest or cheeks.  
"Taking the Impala?"

"No, we'll take the bus. Somehow, turns out I'm better at pretending I'm just an ordinary Joe if I'm not driving a car fit for funerals."

" _Hey._ "

"It's true. Besides, I don't think she can take this easy if I'm driving her to the hospital like she was dying - you borrowing me the Impala is pretty much the sign of the end times, everyone knows it. We take the bus everywhere, we'll take it to the hospital too. But you and Cas will have the whole bunker to yourselves, and I can't take Henry with me."

Dean glanced at the younger.  
"We'll look after him, he's a good kid."

"Yeah, about that," Sam said with a grimace, looking away.  
He sipped his coffee under Dean's demanding stare before continuing.  
"Look, I'm not saying you do this, because you haven't yet. I'm just worried, the way Anna takes a lot of looking after. The fact he's a good kid doesn't mean he doesn't need to be supervised. Just... don't ignore him because he doesn't set things on fire."

"I won't, Sam. He'll be right there."

"Yeah. Just... just watch him with Anna, too."

Dean wanted to argue - say that Anna wouldn't be a threat to Henry, that Henry and her got along famously, which was true. In the end however, no words made it past the ever-growing wall of _what if_ , and both him and Sam just turned away from one another to continue doing what they'd been doing all along with the conversation cut off and dried.

 

* * *

 

**Winter**

Anna was starting to take her first steps. It was still a month to her first birthday, so it came early if compared with the average, but Dean figured it was easier to find targets to scorch if you could get there quicker and on your own two feet, scout them out from the higher ground. It was happening more and more often: they'd both seen it now, the way it happened. She could be handling a cube, chewing at it and throwing it and trying to crack it like a coconut on the floor when suddenly her body turned rigid and her eyes assumed a white glow for a swift, passing moment, like when an angel possessed a body. The exception was that angel eyes glowed blue, and hers were just that, full of pale white light, and that light would charge inside her veins to her palm and burn the object she was holding. The damage was more often than not nothing but a bad smell and a browned-out surface if the light burned clothing or other fabrics, or a really bad smell and some minor melting on a plastic object, but that wasn't the worrysome part. The worrysome part was that it happened, and it happened much too often showing no signs of ceasing. Quite the contrary, it happened more and more frequently, and there seemed to be nothing that Dean could do about it.  
Castiel assumed it was a spontaneous burst of energy resulting from her growing strength in opposition to the slower-developing control and acknowledgement of said strength, and that it was probably a power akin to smiting, just extremely low-level and hardly life-threatening to anything but a being smaller than a mouse. Dean, a little doubtful about the last part, noted that it would definitely be very inconvenient for a mouse to lose half its hair and develop a hand-sized second-degree burn on its body. Castiel agreed. 

Then, just when Dean and Castiel had decided it was going too far, it went too far and then some. Dean had barely lifted his eyes from the two children as he reached for the remote on the couch behind him in the media room when suddenly there was a sickening sizzling sound and a sharp scream of pain ending in the loudest crying he'd ever heard from the mouth of a child. Castiel didn't bother turning around - his wings took him directly to the spot and he pushed Anna away from Henry, taking the boy in his arms and grabbing his blistered red arm to view. Meanwhile, Dean had stumbled to the girl who was crying just as well; Dean couldn't know if it was because of what had happened or because Castiel had shoved her off so unexpectedly that she'd fallen back in her sitting position.

"Cas," Dean called out, voice trembling and panicked, "Cas - she didn't do it on purpose - is he alright? Cas, is he going to be okay?"

He held an arm across Anna's chest and kept her close to himself, but the screaming of the both of them at once was painfully battering at his ears and he could hardly calm himself down, much less the girl who probably knew he was upset and therefore everything was lost. Dean could feel his heart beating hard against the back of the girl and everything else had turned slow motion-like, sounds slurred and air cold as ice.  
He watched Castiel sit down on the couch. 

"He's alright. I'll take care of him. Calm down. Make sure Anna is alright too, Dean."

The angel's eyes turned down towards the boy and glowed faint blue for a moment, fingers wrapped tight around his hand to allow his energy to flow into him. In front of their eyes, the blisters grew smaller and the skin less irritated, finally smoothing out in its entirety in no more than a few seconds. Henry didn't stop crying, but the volume lowered at once and soon the screaming turned into upset sobbing instead. Castiel kept him close and Dean couldn't hear what he was saying to him, but whatever it was, it calmed the boy down soon enough.  
Anna, on the other hand, was kicking up a storm and Dean felt like he had no control over it. He struggled to forget his own panic in order to fully concentrate on the girl's instead, but the struggle went over his capability to contain and trying to calm Anna down with tears running down his face was a wasted attempt. He didn't even notice Castiel getting down from the couch and kneeling next to him before the male had wrapped his arms around him and pressed his mouth against the side of his head.

"Dean," he murmured gently, "Calm down. We'll figure this out. Let me take her."

His hands slid down Dean's back and grabbed their still-screaming daughter instead. Something about him stopped the tantrum she'd been consumed by, and instead of kicking and flashing sparks she just started crying like usually when something had scared or hurt her. Dean was holding his hand over his mouth and nose and joined the other in too when the signs of hyperventilation presented themselves: it had been a long while since anything had brought him past that point, but with the ever-growing sense of losing control, it didn't come as a surprise. Embarrasment was like acid pouring into his veins and it burned his insides with the intent to kill.  
As he tried to remind his body how to breathe again - that he wasn't choking, that the air was good to breathe and that there was more than enough of it for all of them together - Dean watched Castiel pull Anna against himself and press his face against her head in turn, muttering words in Enochian, something he never did to anyone else. Her fingers grasped his shirt and her right fist was trying to break his collarbone with sharp little punches, but Castiel was all but immune to all of that and he stayed calm like a frozen lake the whole time. His eyes closed, palm spreading over the girl's back to hold her still, the other holding her thigh as she sat on the arm, her weight divided between that and the angel's chest. His words kept flowing almost directly into her ear and little by little the punches lost their edge and the crying quieted down. 

Henry wobbled over to Dean and reached a hand to caress his. This broke his eye contact to Castiel and Anna, reminding him that there was still a fourth person in the room, and slowly his hands slid off of his face and his mouth twitched into a confused little smile.  
"Hey, you okay, little man?" he heard himself asking. 

The boy nodded like a soldier.

"Good. Good. Come here."   
Dean wasn't sure for whose comfort he took the kid on his lap, but it seemed to work well for them both. Henry wiggled around on him and reached for the remote that Dean had completely forgotten existed. It had a toddler-size palm print melted on the side, but it worked just fine despite the damage.

"Tee," the boy chimed shyly. 

"TV?" Dean asked him, finding his voice working better than he'd expected. 

"Mm," he replied with a hint of a teary smile and nodded promptly. 

Castiel's hand appeared over Dean's shoulder as he was taking the remote from Henry.  
"Dean," he called quietly to gain his attention, "Watch cartoons with Henry. I'll take Anna for a bit." 

Dean nodded, brain full of static noise.

 

* * *

 

They called Sam at the hospital when Castiel returned; he'd gotten Anna to nap and Henry was near back to normal after a round of bright pastel-coloured programs that Dean found surprisingly soothing to watch.  
Unlike what the older had prepared for, Sam didn't get angry.   
"Keep her within a distance," he said instead, and it hurt more than anger could have. 

He got back two hours later - Jennifer had been admitted that week to stay until delivery, as her test results kept coming back alarming. Sam was more often with her than he was in the bunker, but this had been the first time in a while when he'd gone alone without Henry. The last she'd reported, Jen felt sick and heavy and hot and uncomfortable and slept most of the time, but she'd somehow managed to convince even Sam that it wasn't going to kill her, so the older was still more nervous about the new baby than he was about her condition. At least she was in the right hands and under knowing supervision.

Dean, on the other hand, worried about the bill that would follow, but if it was what it took to keep both Jen and his hopefully-niece (Jennifer knew, nobody else did) healthy and safe, then they'd dig the money out from somewhere. At worst Dean would make a few rounds on the field again, make money where none existed and come back whenever the millions had been paid and he no longer had to gamble through it. If it would come to that, then Sam had better join up with him - if he wanted to multiply, he'd work for the upkeep, too. Not that Sam wouldn't: he'd always been the responsible one. Dean doubted he'd even let the older go out by himself if it was about money he owed. This was the downside to one of them legally existing, and to having a base to hold. They couldn't just slip from the radar and leave the bills to someone else. Instead, they had to do their best to limit attention to themselves, and sometimes that meant paying money they didn't have.

The door's sound was heavy when Dean closed it after himself, shutting out the past recap of what had happened and beginning another conversation that he wasn't looking forwards to with Castiel standing in front of him. Instead of speaking, however, the angel went to Anna and, upon finding her awake, took her from the crib.  
She was still tired, but the commotion had probably woken her up - she reached a hand towards the angel's face and mumbled a lone _aa_ before letting it fall back and yawning. 

"Come sit with us, Dean," Castiel suggested warmly as he sat down on the bed and patted the spot next to him. 

Dean walked over like cement blocks were tied to his feet and sunk on the spot with his back and shoulders lurched forwards.  
"Cas, we've gotta make her stop," he mumbled, unable to look at Anna and instead staring at Castiel's hand instead.

The angel placed his free hand on Dean's shoulder.  
"We can't," he said quietly.

Dean felt his heart sinking, then beginning to beat harder like it was trying to climb back to its chamber. When he raised his eyes to Castiel's face to try and make sense of him - was he truly giving up? How could he? - the older seemed as calm as ever.  
It didn't make sense to Dean, and his disbelief showed on his face as clear as day.  
"Then what the fuck do we do, Cas? Kill her, is that it?" 

The angel shook his head, turning to look at the idle door and then the crib that sway sluggishly in front of them.  
"Of course not," he huffed, "No." 

"Then we _have_ to get her to stop!" 

"Dean, she's not human." 

Dean stared at the older.  
"Do you fucking think I've forgotten? That I could _possibly_ forget?"  
He tried his best to keep his voice low but Anna was sensing the confrontation and wiggled uneasily in Castiel's lap with a teary frown on her face.  
The angel looked down at her and caressed her face for a moment before turning to Dean again. 

"Take her."

"What?"

"Take her," Castiel repeated neutrally and handed Anna to Dean instead.  
Her weight settled on Dean's lap and her hands reached to hold his shirt. Her round blue eyes looked at him and her mouth was open - she looked a little scared, and Dean couldn't help but melt to the expression. Smiling, he held her tighter. 

"You can't _make_ her human either, Dean. No matter how hard you try, it's not possible." 

Dean opened his mouth to argue, fire building in his chest and rising like bile to his mouth, but he didn't know what to say.  
  
"Just say what you're after, Cas, because I don't feel up to games." 

"I'm not playing any games. I'm trying to make you understand. Think about Sam." 

"What about Sam? What does Sam have to do with this?"

Castiel's eyes stayed upon Dean's and he held up his zen impression so well that Dean wanted to punch him again to make it shatter. Of course, the only thing to shatter would have been his fist, and the very last thing Anna needed was an example of violence from her parents, so he held himself back.  
"Sam is human," Castiel started to explain, "but because of the demon blood, he isn't ordinary. That doesn't make him evil or bad, but he's always felt it does. It's not because of the blood itself - his powers may stem from a dark place, but in him, they are neutral. Without the corruption of drinking demon blood, his visions and powers that came to him naturally were neutral. All power is." 

"Can I just disagree with you?" 

"No, because I'm still talking. I'm trying to make a point. You told Sam to not use his powers. Did he do that?" 

"No, but -" 

"No, he did not. Firstly, a major part of them was out of his control, because he had no idea how to take control of them. He couldn't explore, because his powers had from the beginning been branded unclean and bad. They made him _different_ in a way that he had to hide - that he had to push deep inside him, so deep that they'd never come out again. He started showing these powers as a young child, didn't he? And the manner his skills manifested was violent and scary. So your father told him to keep them hidden, and passed this to you as well. Anything out of ordinary was dangerous and evil. In the end, using them would turn him into a monster."   
  
Dean swallowed. He didn't want to talk about Sam or the demon blood _or_ their childhood, but the parallel Castiel was making was slowly becoming solid. 

"Everyone told Sam his powers were bad and because they were natural to him, by extension he had to be bad as well. When he found the source of his strength, it did nothing to make him feel better about his difference - it was a confirmation for everything he'd ever been told. His whole life, he'd been a devout believer, seeking forgiveness and acceptance from God, and when he met angels... even I viewed him as an abomination. As an angel, I was one of the things he'd trusted to be those that would not shun him for what he was. I regret it still, but I didn't know better. I couldn't judge people for who they are instead of simply looking at what they are, what roles they served, or what I'd been told about them. My point is, everything around Sam told him that his powers were bad and evil, and in the end, he gave in because he needed a way out. If he was evil, why fight it? If he couldn't control his power and he'd never learn to, and in this way he'd always be an abomination, why should he pretend to be something he wasn't, why not simply give in to his nature and try to make the best of it, even if there was no way for it to ever end well? We know how it ended, and we know that to date, he _still_ doesn't feel pure. It doesn't matter whether that blood is in him or if it's not - his whole life he's been made to feel that he is wrong. How does a wound like that heal?"

Anna was falling asleep. She didn't look like a monster.

"If we repeat that mistake with Anna, it won't bear a different fruit. In the end, she won't be prepared to fight the darkness in her, and it'll consume her. And then, yes, we will have to kill her. It doesn't have to be that way." 

"So what do you suggest?" Dean asked, voice choked and thick and only half his mind on the girl that he held. 

"I suggest that we encourage it instead. I have a theory why she's doing it, and why she's only doing it with you and never when I'm the one with her." 

Dean raised his eyes from the sleeping baby and looked at Castiel as if for the first time.  
"Are you crazy?" 

"Likely," the angel said with a smile, tilting his head to the side in a submissive manner, "but are you willing to hear out my crazy theory?" 

Dean's lips pressed tighter together and he swallowed. Then, slowly, he nodded.  
"Go ahead." 

"You are the one that she trusts more out of the two of us. You are the one who is, undoubtedly, closer to her. I'm the nice parent - I don't know how to be with kids, and her humanity, her immaturity, is a relatively new experience for me. I don't set the rules for her, I simply provide shelter for her and clean up when she makes a mess. She lets her powers out around you because instinctively, she is trying to find her limits. Everything she does she does to mirror herself to us, and in this particular case, you're not responding. Her powers scare you and she _knows_ that they do. She must feel bad about it, which results in her trying harder to get you to interact with her, which in turn locks you up further. Isn't that correct?"

Dean shrugged.  
"To be honest, Cas, I'm pretty terrified of her." 

"Precisely. She's not even a year old yet, Dean, and you're already trying to turn her into something she is not because her powers scare you. You say you know that she's not human, but you're trying your best to make her into one. You hope that if we lock her powers, she'll stop being a nephil. We both know that won't happen. We cannot stop her. That's what I'm saying. So we must try something else instead." 

"Training? You said it yourself - she's not even a year old yet." 

"I began training the moment I was created, Dean. I can't remember that, yet the first memories I do have, as broken as they are, are of my brothers and sisters guiding me in the ways of war. Teaching me to use my powers, explaining the sets of rules and the absolute laws. An angel cannot have a childhood. She's half an angel, and she's already shown what kind of an effect allowing her the environment of a human child is having on her. At the same time, she's not an angel, so I cannot take her to the field and tell her to show me her blade and come at me to kill. She can't even walk, much less understand her own strength. It's an interesting combination. I have an idea on how to work with it, however."

"You sound like you're going to... I don't know. Make her into a soldier. I don't want that, Cas."

"She _is_ a soldier."  
Castiel's voice was even and matter-of-factly. Dean hated the way he looked at him. 

"She's just a baby." 

"And for one, she's picking her opponents well. Instead of burning you, she burned Henry - Henry is approximately her age, her size. She knows that you are stronger than she is, and, I'm sorry, but that means she already controls you. I don't think she realises this consciously, but it's what she's doing. Picking her battles. I'm doing my best to learn about raising a child like her, and my plan is to try give her order that way. First, I'm afraid you'll have to teach me to be a better parent so that I will be worth her trust. And when she shows her powers to me, I can respond in kind. I can give her the mirror she needs, because that part of her is the part I gave her. And I will teach her the proper way to use it."

 

* * *

 

Sam watched with amused interest as Dean tried to not interfere with Castiel learning proper parenthood. The angel kept glancing at him in a state of utter confusion - when to stop Anna, when to encourage her, how to guide her interests and what did that particular tone of screaming mean exactly. In a week's time, he was getting better. Before whenever Anna had been upset for an invisible human reason, it had been Dean who'd tended to her needs. Since Dean was next to impossible to remove from her side at all, Dean was usually the one to tell her _no_ as well, the one who distracted her from trying to chew the TV cable and the one who grabbed her when she'd fallen and hurt herself, although whenever she bruised or bled, it was always Castiel who took care of her injuries, being the swift first-aid kit to all injuries that he as a seraph was.  
Even that had stopped now: they'd agreed it was time the kid learned to deal with pain, if for nothing else then for her to be able to understand what it was like for others. Castiel suspected that soon enough she'd learn to take care of it on her own anyway and after that the hardest part would be to teach her that not everyone could do so, and that others had to feel pain and endure it when felt - that injuries, pain and suffering weren't something to simply shrug off. 

It made her angry. Dean could see it straight away: first the normal upsetness at the unpleasant feeling when she fell and hurt herself, and then the confusion when relief wasn't instant and throughout. Then came the anger: why weren't they acting? She threw a tantrum that, for the first time, sparked her nephil powers to hurt _because_ she wanted it to happen. It was Castiel holding her - Dean could see the light passing through her and into the angel, and the small jump the unexpected pain caused the older. Then came the small, satisfied smile on the angel's features, the calmness that Dean associated with him dealing with situations that were terrifying for Dean. Even as irritated, painful-looking blisters grew upon his skin, Castiel took her hand and then the other, and he held them as his eyes flashed with blue and his powers charged to the palms that he'd joined with the girl's.   
It took Anna's whole attention - she even forgot to cry. All her anger vanished that instant and Castiel's grip around her fists loosened. Instead of continuing the tantrum, she now started examining the light that lingered about Castiel's skin, and Castiel brought her hand to the damage she'd caused and he pressed her sticky palm over the burnt skin as his powers healed it.

"Look," Dean heard the angel tell her in a warm voice, "It's gone. It doesn't hurt anymore. Can you do that?" 

Anna looked at him with an expression of awe and fell on her behind. Then she started examining his palms again, looking for the light that had vanished. Dean's fingertips grew cold when her eyes lit up again and the light charged to her hands - Castiel's blue-white glow met it at the point where he took her hands in his again and in an absurd show of supernatural, both him and her just held their shining hands together.  
Then Anna started laughing and the light vanished.  
Castiel looked at Dean with a smile. 

"She didn't try to hurt me this time," he told him, and Dean felt a heavy weight slipping off his heart like an ugly, slimy sack of nightmares.

 

* * *

Jennifer delivered a healthy girl four days after her due date, the day before Anna's birthday. She came home with a big bundle and an even bigger hospital bill, but all in all, it was a good thing that sufficiently took everyone's attention away from the incident between Anna and Henry two weeks before. Sam looked after her and the newborn near equally: Jen was still exhausted and a little depressed, as Sam revealed to Dean one evening after the kids were asleep and they were huddled up in their own corners of the big couch watching Pulp Fiction for the millionth time to relax after an exhausting day. Castiel was gods knew where - he'd dropped by earlier to take a look at the new baby and then vanished again, and Dean carried the baby monitor with him everywhere more faithfully than he'd ever carried a gun to make sure he'd be there the moment Anna would wake up, if she would, and which she seemed to have decided against. Every now and then the radio let out a raspy electric sound that made Dean jump or at least glance at it, but nothing further ever happened, so he could settle back into the infrequent conversation and reciting the movie from memory.

"She seems to be doing better," Sam stated after a while semi-conversationally, and it took Dean a while to realise he wasn't talking about Jen anymore. 

"Yeah," he replied a little absently, picked himself up and readjusted on the couch, "Yeah, Cas's idea seems to be working. I don't know." 

"She doesn't seem as angry anymore. She smiles more often again." 

"Mm-hmm. I'm still not letting her near Henry, though. She has to do better than this." 

Sam nodded.  
"Yeah," he said in turn, "Yeah."  
The repeat was more thoughtful and Dean could almost hear his thoughts get sidetracked and then upon a fresh new rail altogether. After a moment's silence, Sam chuckled.  
"Do you ever look at Cas and try to match him up with the guy who raised you from hell?" 

Dean grinned crookedly.  
"Sometimes," he said and shrugged, "They're not much alike." 

"Like yesterday when he was curled up on his side on the study floor trying to understand your kid better by assuming her point of view."

"Mm."  
Dean chuckled warmly.  
"He's an idiot." 

"He's pretty clever for an idiot. And he works hard to learn."

"He's a good guy."  
There was so much behind those words, and Dean was rather embarrassed to know that Sam knew exactly the shades that he'd so casually hidden there. 

"Yeah," the other simply replied as Uma Thurman was stabbed in the chest, "He is."


	8. The Hunter and the Hunted

* * *

 

 

**Second year**

Anna looked like an angel. It was ridiculous, the whole look of her; the thick dark hair that curled like Castiel's framed her round face that with Dean's skin looked strangely pale in contrast. Her features were controlled by the piercing eyes and her pouty mouth, and the whole together with her sharp nose made her look strangely like the American baby version of Audrey Tatou. Despite the association, mainly caused by the way her hair had grown rather than any true similarity, there was no question of whose child she was. If there had ever been a girl more in the image of her parents than Anna was, then Dean had definitely not seen nor heard of such an oddity.  
Of course he still remembered why this was so, but in the end, he couldn't convince himself to make the difference. She was theirs and the whole world could have seen it, if it wasn't for her uncontrolled behaviour and the radiantly shining aura that made Castiel reluctant to let her mix in with other children.

Fallen angels were still around, and those that had returned to Heaven were by no means locked inside anymore. They could and did come and go as they damn well pleased, an inconvenience that sometimes called hunters into action (a relatively common occurrence that the Men of Letters were unfortunate enough to be the ones to try and resolve without conflict in order to preserve the relative peace) and which was a constant multi-reasoned source of headache for Dean.  
It was clear that Anna would have benefitted from the company of other children. Her social skills were lacking in interaction with her own age, as she'd never had the opportunity to meet other kids and even Henry had been kept relatively separated from her from an early age, only to be nearly completely cut from her when she'd attacked him. Nobody knew if the attack had been intentional or not and if such standards could even yet be applied to Anna's actions, but the risk of it happening again - with worse results - was still much too high to allow them to spend much time together. The combination of these factors made it too risky for her to be allowed out in public: being spotted by an angel could have well resulted in an attempt on her life, and she could've all too easily revealed herself to other unwanted eyes by accidentally or intendingly using her powers in company. For now, it was hardly much an issue; she was too young to form complicated social relationships and by the time she'd be looking for them, Dean hoped she would be developed enough to control herself better. In the meantime, they tried to figure out other ways to keep her socially up to date. At least she got her fill of other adult individuals, as everyone remained quite attracted to her and curious about her - she was a rare opportunity to watch a non-human person grow up, and while she was much like a human child, she had her quirks that made her an interesting thing to observe. All in all, with the Men of Letters (and especially the Women of Letters) she was quite popular and loved.

The notebooks were piling up even after they'd give up tracking her human development, as it seemed to be progressing exactly as expected - she was a little behind on speech but moved well for her age, and it was hardly a surprise that she preferred Metallica to children's songs when she'd been forced to occupy the same space with Dean for her whole life. Dean and Castiel had brought out a box for the books, but it looked like they might need another or at least a bigger one to replace it soon, as Anna's development was hardly going to stop, yet it was already hard to fit in another book in the midst of the rest.  
Charlie was Anna's favourite person outside Dean and Castiel, and Kevin her least favourite. It fit them both well enough; Charlie loved playing with her and could well be trusted with her alone as she wasn't afraid of her powers, whereas Kevin didn't really know how to be with kids and preferred the company of his console games instead.

By summer Anna had already stopped charring things and turned her powers back into throwing them instead. Her strength was unbelievable and made child-proofing a task much harder than it already was, since she could tear off virtually any kind of tape and push aside most furniture that kept her from accessing whichever potential death trap she wished to explore further. Castiel was the one who looked after her the most now, with Dean taking the role of the more passive, boring parent that sat on the couch keeping up idle chatter and encouraging the nephil to do anything that didn't involve death and destruction as an unfortunate side-effect.  
The setting gave him a chance to relax and learn to live with the girl's powers again without allowing them to control him or his life. Letting go was surprisingly easy when he knew Castiel was up to the task and could handle the part that he'd feared was beyond them both. For once, things were looking up again.

 

* * *

 

"No."  
It was her favourite word.  
"No."

Castiel looked up at the ceiling and seemed to be making a call home. His eyes turned round towards Dean, chin still up, with an expression of defeated agony in them. Dean grimaced.  
"Anna, c'me here," the younger called, turning from the angel to the girl.

Anna pouted but marched up to him.  
"No."

"Yeah, yeah."

She sat down in front of him.  
"No."

"Yes. Cas, give me the comb."  
Anna was still pouting. When Castiel came closer, she climbed back on her feet and ran rather pathetically away. The angel looked after her and seemed hurt. Dean watched him with a crooked, faint smile and shook his head in mild disbelief.  
"She's just angry you went away."

"I told her I was going."

"I don't think she cares, Cas."  
They exchanged looks and the desperation in Castiel's eyes made it hard for Dean not to grin at him.  
"You'll be back in favour in a few days. Just... go do something else so that I can get the knot out before it turns her hair into dreadlocks. Anna - come back?"  
She sat in front of the wall and started digging at the corner with her blunt nails.  
"I'm going to come and get you if you don't, and you hate it when I do that. We can go out after sparrows won't be tempted to nest in your hair anymore."

"No."

Castiel chuckled. He turned away and walked to the bed, opening up the half-filled notebook, apparently finding this as good an opportunity as any to continue what he'd started writing earlier.  
"We can go to play at the lake." 

"No."

"With Henry and Grace." 

"No," she said, but glanced at Dean warily. 

"Yeah," Dean countered, "I think it's a great idea. Sammy was saying earlier that he was taking them out anyway. We could tag along." 

"Mm-mm." 

"Not if you look like a troll, though. So you have to decide: you can come here and I'll comb your hair so that we can go out and play, or you can stay there for the rest of the night and won't get to go out at all."

"No."  
Anna's sticky fingers slid along the wall as she climbed up. She looked like her pride had been wounded when she unwillingly made her way back to Dean.  
Dean grabbed her and brought her on his lap. 

"Good girl."

 

* * *

 

The lake looked dull grey and the wind that crossed through was cold and wet. Leaves gathered at the shoreline and kept falling from the trees as they stayed: Jen had the youngest sleeping in the carrier, and Henry was trying to escape from Sam to go deeper in the water. His boots were cleaner than the shoes of the rest of them, constantly licked by the sandy waters that he kicked up as he went.  
Anna was following them close by, gnawing at her index finger thoughtfully. Every now and then she picked up sticks and went to drop them in the water, looking curious as they floated back to her so that she could throw them back. Then she lost interest and went to pick up something else instead. Castiel, still fallen from favour, had settled to guard the dock. Dean stood behind him, taking every chance to call Anna back to them and engage her in some mundane conversation ("What did you find? Don't eat it - let me see. Oh, wow, that's really neat.") before letting her off again. She seemed happy to be out, but the lengthy angry phase was still raging and she had to keep up the air of indifference around them. Dean wasn't sure it was age-appropriate, but she was clearly acting, so he tried not to worry about it. 

"I'm going to need to hang the whole of him to dry after this," Sam mumbled as he kneeled next to Dean and Castiel, eyes keen upon Henry as he finally gave up with his attempts at drowning and went to see what Anna was gathering instead. 

Jennifer moved to them, climbed on the dock and sat next to Castiel on the dock. She'd taken Grace out but she was still sleeping, completely unaffected by the cold wind and the shrieks Henry and Anna were letting out in her snuggly cocoon.   
Meanwhile, Anna had taken a sharp turn and started running towards something, but her jog cut short when her boot collided with a stone and she fell on all fours: Henry stopped to kneel next to her and looked concerned when she started crying, but none of the adults budged even if Dean felt like something was clawing at his chest with each sound she made. She'd come back to them if she needed soothing - as long as she wasn't hurt bad, it was alright for her to get over it on her own. She did so quite soon, standing up still sobbing and sniffing to follow Henry to the edge of the forest. The boy sat down and started digging at the sand, and Anna followed suit. She found a stick and after tasting it and finding it unappealing as a consumable, it found its way into the sand. 

"She looks so normal," Jen said absently from the side. 

As if having heard what she'd said, Anna's eyes flashed and the stick in its entirety vanished into the ground with a single push.  
"Whoa," Henry commented and started digging it out. 

"Yeah, no," Dean muttered with a shrug.

 

* * *

 

**Third year**

Dean felt heavy as he slammed closed the back of the Impala.  
"I don't know if I can do it," he uttered grimly, hand still on the cold metal.  
His breath was nothing but clouds of mist and the cold was sticking together the fine hair inside his nostrils. All in all, it wasn't a good day to leave. 

Sam chuckled, patting him on the back.  
"Come on, Dean," he grinned disbelievingly, "It's a common haunting. We'll be back tomorrow. A day on the hunt won't end the world, and that's the point. You need to trust them. You need to take a break." 

Dean frowned like in pain, letting out a held-back breath and shifting uncomfortably. He glanced at Sam and then back at the garage's mouth.  
"I don't think it's a good idea after all." 

"Yes, it is. Let's go, I'm freezing. Please. People are dying." 

"People are always dying, Sam."

"My point exactly."

The older cast a pained, conflicted look around him and shifted again as if starting to step in both directions at once. Then his eyes returned upon Sam and he nodded, as stiffly and unwillingly as ever, but the nod was a nod and Sam seemed satisfied with it. They got in the car and Dean started the engine telling himself that if anything would change, he could just steer the thing around and come back whenever he wanted to. However, when distance began to build between him and the bunker, a sense of freedom grew within him, and when he turned on the radio to blast old school rock as loud as he could just to see Sam suffer, even relaxation came to him as it had once always done when he'd entered the car and turned head towards adventure.

Little snow had fallen so far but the weather was beyond chilling, and it took them both a long while to shed their coats. Sam still had his daddy beard; to Dean's surprise, he was growing used to it. Even stranger, he was growing one on himself, if only because he couldn't keep so many things on his mind at once to actually take the time to shave. His private moments (or perhaps not very private, given that Castiel often accompanied him, and he'd given up trying to argue about it) in the morning were quite well limited to getting his teeth clean and emptying his bladder before charging out to make sure nothing was burning. Nothing ever was, because he never left Anna unsupervised, but hell if he didn't worry about it.  
Now a quite different man was looking back at him from the rear mirror of the car, and the sight of his older face surprised him each time. He looked like a man, not like a hunter in his early thirties - he could have been anyone, not even a bruise on his body and his skin, if showing some signs of stress still, was full and healthy-looking and while still covered in freckles, it didn't look like he spent his every waking moment working outdoors. The dark shadows under his eyes had changed drastically since a couple years back when he'd still hunted frequently and spent weeks on the road: now he looked like a father with a young child. In fact, everything about him looked that way.  
  
Disturbed, he pulled the collar of his shirt down and recast a look in the mirror.   
"Damn, I need to shave," he muttered. 

Sam laughed.  
"It just stops being a priority, right?" 

The corner of Dean's mouth twitched. Settled and stable, it seemed. Married with kids.  
  
"It's funny, though, isn't it," the younger continued quieter, reaching a hand to turn down the Asia blasting from the radio.  
Dean allowed him to tone the volume a little before smacking his hand down from the switch. Sam cast him a half-amused, half-annoyed look and his mouth twitched as well as he settled back on the shotgun, letting out a small sigh that Dean could now hear over the music.  
"I mean," he kept going as if nobody had ever hit him in between the sentences, "I did hope for this. For all of this. Always, I guess, ever since I was a kid. Even - you know - for a way to avoid choosing, which is what we got. We have the Letters and - and we can still live... normally." 

"Communally." 

"Normally, Dean."  
  
When Dean glanced at Sam, the other's eyes sparkled with happiness. Dean was pretty sure it was the result of a combination: the fact that they were where they were in their lives, the fact they were in the car on a trip to the past, the fact that everything was so normal and ordinary for them while at the same time being quite so on the universal scale as well. That they'd gotten to this point in their lives, a point that neither had dared to dream could be reality, and that neither of them had died before reaching that place.  
Well, permanently, anyway. 

The older felt the corner of his mouth twitching again, but he avoided looking in the mirror.  
"It's funny alright," he admitted, hating himself for the way he slowed down before the crossroads to avoid sliding on the ice that covered the road underneath them, "imagine how Dad would..." 

Sam scoffed, snorted and started laughing. Dean barely dared to look at him.   
"Dad would probably shoot us, Dean," he choked, then added more seriously, more bitterly; "especially you." 

"Yeah, no kidding."  
Gay for a monster with a monster kid. John Winchester's ashes were probably churning somewhere right about then.  
"Sometimes I kind of wonder why he didn't when he could." 

"Dean, don't." 

"Yeah."  
In the silence that followed, Europe started playing on the radio and Dean found himself grimacing. He wiped the expression from his face and laughed instead.  
"You know, I think you were right. Getting back to work _is_ going to do me good."

 

* * *

 

They picked a cheaper than usual motel a few miles from town, settling in for the night immediately. Sam brought out his laptop and started summing up the case - they'd gone in relatively old-fashionedly, having only picked the place and case and left the rest to be worked out on road. It allowed them to feel like it was exactly like a hunt was supposed to be, without the whole fuss of having an army of helpers ready to deliver at your command, and while Sam was doing what he did best, Dean headed out to grab them a greasy meal.

For once, it pleased them both. They'd assumed a somewhat balanced diet at the bunker, having somewhere to store all that meat and salad, and dining on something entirely unhealthy just happened to taste really good after eating like a normal person (and having a bunch of other people making sure you did) for such a lengthy while. This was the kind of crap they'd grown up on, a miracle on its own that they hadn't stopped growing vertically before hitting numbers above four at all with the nutritional value granted by mac and cheese and hamburgers, and while it held nostalgy to the time they'd lived on the road, it was also the food that no matter how long they stayed away from, their mouths still considered the most familiar type to consume.  
Other kids ended up grudgingly liking salad - for the two of them, salad had been rich people food, apple-pie life kind of a luxury that they simply couldn't afford. And then, of course, Sam had fled to college and assumed the role of one of them. Dean hadn't; the first time Dean had ever felt like he could actually afford or even deserved to eat all the green food was after they'd settled in the bunker. A healthy diet was like a ritual, one that they'd now put behind them to pretend they weren't as normal as they'd suddenly grown to be - or at least as normal as members of a secret society could be. 

After checking the channels (and skipping the porn), Dean settled to sleep with a bloated stomach and a clean-shaven face, expecting to have the usual stubble back in the picture when he'd wake up in the morning.  
Sam, refusing to enter his role as a lone hunter in full, made a video call back home to say good night to his son and get a glimpse at Grace sleeping soundly in her crib.   
Dean liked to pretend he didn't have a kid - that even Castiel didn't exist. They'd forgive him, he thought, already half-asleep.

 

* * *

 

Late in the morning, figuring it was a good time to start and after slacking off in a local café very much like their old selves, the brothers knocked on the door of the victim's house and found his daughter allowing them entry. They were dressed in their rather expensive fake-FBIs and after flipping their badges gained access to a table full of freshly made coffee and bakery-made goods, probably bought to serve the family and friends who would inevitably swarm to pay their respects later on. By the table sat the widow, her hair looking dead and fragile like an old person's after so many bleaches, eyes matching the look as she watched the white yard outside the kitchen window. Sam put out his best, offering genuine condolences before masking his invasive questions with a veil of unwillingness to ask them and a polite turn of words wherever one could possibly be hoped for. That was where he truly was at his best, where his special talents shone: Dean knew well he sucked at this part and therefore only stayed quiet unless Sam requested his help via cues and gestures invisible to those around them. And when he got the chance, the older excused himself from the table to go look for the toilet and to "explore" - Sam coughed and dubbed it as a profiling excercise, to absolutely eliminate the chance of a crime having occurred.

In truth, Dean did use the bathroom but only to ready his EMF, and then made his rounds around the two-floor house. He wasn't disappointed: the whole place flared up and caused the small machine to scream loudly before he casually flipped it back inside his jacket and returned downstairs with a face of satisfaction on him. They left the place with more condolences and apologies for potential future inconvenience caused by the possibility of a revisit, and then they returned to the café to get something not sweet to fill up their bellies over a full recap of what they knew.

In the evening, after the church service for the dead guy was over and, finally, the priest had driven off hopefully leaving the holy ground somewhat void of watchful eyes, Dean and Sam slipped quietly over the stone wall and dug open the grave of a bitter grandmother, setting her remains on fire.  
On the way back, they stopped by the house and Dean made a sneaky course round it with his EMF out, even going as far as climbing the ladder to get his hand in the house through the upper level window. Where previously had been the ear-breaking sound of the meter was now a deep silence, in which Dean closing the creaky window sounded like a war elephant blasting a full-scale cry in announcement of its presence on the field. 

"Good that the alarm system gets installed tomorrow," he muttered as he settled on the shotgun and Sam started the car.   
The younger smirked with a nod.

 

* * *

 

Next morning they headed back towards Lebanon with steaming, freshly brewed takeaways accompanying the lengthy journey. Dean was driving and Sam was reading the day's paper - the older noticed him instinctively searching the small articles before reading the main headlines or even more than glancing toward them.  
"Nothing?" 

"Nothing," Sam confirmed with an absent smile, "Funny that I looked." 

"Old habits," Dean agreed and headed for the highway.  
In a moment's time, Sam stretched the paper out and leaned in closer with a frown. That if any was a sign Dean knew.  
He turned down the radio and glanced. 

"Something?" he asked now. 

Sam let out a concentrated sound.  
"Something." 

The drive took three hours, and when they arrived at the bunker, the first person Dean was calling for was Castiel. The angel appeared before them before they could reach the end of the corridor, brows creasing and head tilting.  
"What's wrong?" he asked. 

Dean walked right into him and hugged him tightly but briefly, stepping back with his eyes already over the newspaper Sam was holding.  
"This," he spoke with a growl as he grabbed it, "is wrong."  
Castiel took the paper and Dean watched his eyes move along the lines much faster than most humans could have done. The angel's lips parted slightly before he handed the paper back. 

"I need to go, Dean." 

"Cas -"

"I will be back. It won't take long." 

"Cas!"

The angel drew in a long breath and aimed a deadly stare at him.  
"What?" he asked frustratedly. 

"Cas, please. Stay. Tell us what you think, don't just - don't just charge off like that. It's... it's not the same as when I leave, Cas, I..." 

"I'll put on more coffee. Who else is in?" Sam asked, clearly wanting to get out of the way of the private talk that he was currently intruding on. 

"Charlie, Jen and Kevin. They'll... all want some," Castiel spoke without ever taking his eyes off Dean.

"How's Anna?" Dean asked as they waited for Sam to get out of the radar.

"Anna is..." Castiel hesitated, his eyes flickering towards the wall in search of a good answer, "Anna's..." 

"Anna's what, Cas? Tell me. Damnit, tell me." 

Castiel's mouth tensed for a moment, then he sighed and looked away.  
"Being difficult," he said then, "I believe it's because you left. She doesn't seem to take it well when either of us does."

"You think -"

"I don't think anything, Dean, not before I have a better, more reliable source of information than your newspaper's section for weird news. Which is why you need to let me go. I'll be back for coffee."

Dean scanned the angel, hesitating. Then, sighing, he reached for him and pulled him into a stiff kiss - Castiel clearly wasn't in his social mode and stayed unwilling the whole time, as if having forgotten they were in a relationship and currently feeling like Dean was a small dog licking at his face in a situation he couldn't get out of.  
When it ended, he still smiled, if still looking a little like he'd gotten jumped. 

"Promise?" Dean pressed heavily. 

"I promise," Castiel replied with a hint of a nod. 

"Then go."

 

* * *

 

Anna was turning three, and her weight started to show. Not that she had been light as a baby, but Dean was used to picking up heavy things and carrying them around - after all, most of his guns neared the weight of a newborn, only they were hard and solid where a baby was soft and somewhat like a bag full of water, constantly trying to slide down from his grip. Now she was heavier than his guns and carrying her, while still easy, was starting to wear his arms down.  
More excercise, he thought unwillingly as he endured the screaming and kicking from the girl and at the same time tried to navigate them to the study. Henry was following him and trying to pry from him the answers his father hadn't given him - he seemed a little worried because Sam hadn't come directly to him.

"Your dad's gonna be right with you, Henry, we just need to talk about something first. Go play, okay?"

The boy didn't, so he got locked up with Anna on the other end of the study. Anna stopped screaming the moment Dean landed her back on the floor and she could get away from his unwanted (or, as Dean assumed, long anticipated) presence by running under a table. Henry told her she was stupid, and she reached out with her relatively long sharp tongue, insulting the boy so badly he declared he hated her and turned away to cling to the gate keeping them away from the coffee table. If they hadn't been cousins and raised like siblings, Dean would have vouched for their early marriage. He tried to not look at Henry when he sat down and grabbed coffee instead, knowing it'd fuel the boy's demands to get out of the locker. Everyone else ignored him as well, but Dean, Sam and Jen were all casting occasional looks at Anna, just to make sure she wasn't going to destroy the table. She seemed content enough, however, appearing to have already engaged herself in some role that involved walking on all fours.

"Where's Cas?" Sam asked from no one in particular, although his eyes did land upon Dean the last and stayed there, brows arching.

"Said he'd be back for coffee," Dean grunted with a wounded shrug, "so I guess we'll see him next w-"  
His sentence was cut off with the sound of wings hitting the air.

"I am here now," Castiel announced, taking the seat next to Dean and looking at him unimpressedly as if knowing exactly what he'd just said.  
Dean flashed him a warm smile and grabbed his hand under the table. The angel's fingers were cold like he'd stayed outdoors for a longer while before appearing here. 

"Charlie?" Sam called, the woman raising her head immediately with a look of pure surprise on her, "Can you get a hold of Garth after we've talked, get the general locations of known hunters?" 

"Sure," she responded, looking like she'd expected some much more daring and dangerous task, "Sure, yeah, I can do that." 

"Alright, good. Thanks, Charlie." 

"Can we get a briefing?" Jennifer asked, placing the monitor on the table next to her cup of coffee, "This all sounds like we have a major apocalyptic event going on and it's killing my appetite." 

Dean huffed into his cup, watching Sam's awkward smile with curiosity.  
"It's - not exactly an apocalyptic event, you can drink, it's just - awkward."

Sam's eyes flickered towards Castiel and then Dean, once more sticking to his brother.  
"It's more of an alarming concern." 

"Okay, guys, what's going on?" Kevin sighed, having thus far stayed surprisingly silent. 

"Briefly," Sam started, laying out the paper in front of them, "I found this."

He pointed to a small article detailing a _strange fire_ destroying a kindergarten in Lawrence. Despite occurring during the day and 'seemingly starting from a non-electric toy held by a 2-year-old', whose name had been emitted, the fire had claimed no victims.  
That was where the fun started.  
The kid had been found unharmed, despite being completely engulfed in flames within ten or so seconds, according to the woman supervising the children. 

"So - this is a case, right?" Kevin asked when the article had been read out loud. 

"Well, there's this line here that makes it _weird news_ ," Sam uttered rather unwillingly and continued, " _According to Ms. Valdez, almost immediately before the fire started, the toddler's eyes had seemed to flash with gray or white light._ "

"Holy shit," Kevin's comment cut the brief silence that followed.

"Sounds like a nephil," Charlie voiced the thoughts that the rest of them, out of pure courtesy towards the pair of parents present around the table, hadn't yet. 

"We were thinking," Dean pushed through the choked feeling in his throat and leaned back in his chair as if he wasn't raising a potential kindergarten-destroying flamestarter himself, "You'd have to be crazy to put a nephil in a place like that with people who have literally no idea..." 

"I don't know, Dean," Sam said after his sentence had faded, "given what we know of nephilim - maybe the parents didn't know. Maybe, I don't know, maybe the kid didn't develop like - like Anna. Maybe they'd never shown what they were capable of before."

Dean turned to look at Castiel.  
"You said you had somewhere to be, Cas," he asked pressuringly, "Your input's welcome now, just in case you were expecting an invitation." 

Their hands parted under the table as Castiel brought both of his on the table. Everyone watched him reach for a cup from the middle of the table and pour it full of steaming black coffee, clearly uncomfortable with the attention he was holding.  
Then he sat back down and cleared his throat, although everyone present knew that he didn't suffer from unclear voice any more than he suffered of acne or the common cold. He had all of that perfectly under control and whenever he showed signs of it not being so, it was learned behaviour to show discomfort in social situations.  
Charlie looked like she'd just seen a puppy yawn. 

"There is a section of angels devoted to the elimination of..."  
Castiel's voice faded and his eyes visited the sight of his daughter who was now building a pile out of blocks with Henry, as they'd both given up trying to be a part of the conversation.  
"... nephilim born during and after the fall." 

Dean's heart stopped and it was probably visible from his expression: he felt others glancing at him, trying to keep it subtle. Castiel looked at him directly next, expression serious and concerned.  
"I swear I did not know, Dean. I've been away a lot. I've merely made sure they do not pose a danger to us and keep order within their own ranks." 

 _They - them - their._ Castiel had just verbally separated himself from the other angels, become something other than what he'd been created as. That wasn't a common occurrence; he felt closer to them still than humans, yet now he was either one of the other _them_ \- the humans - or painfully stuck in the middle where he most often landed when he couldn't find his place from amongst the rest of his kind.  
The other noteworthy detail, although one of a smaller scale, was the them vs. us present in his sentences.  
  
Dean swallowed, attempting a wavering smile.   
"I know," he said hoarsely and cleared his throat in a hasty cough, "I know. They have free hands to govern themselves, clean up their messes. We should have known but I guess..."

Castiel nodded, turning his eyes down to his coffee again. In the expecting, unclear silence where none of them knew if he was going to continue, he sipped from his cup and under the table, returned his warming hand into Dean's hold.

"I hope for the sake of the child that I did not alert them to its presence. That I did not give out more than I wanted to. According to Iofiel, the group has been 'succesful' to date." 

"Fuck this," Dean muttered under his breath and tried to drown his sudden nausea with a mouthful of coffee.  
Then, without being judged by anyone in their presence, he laid his head down upon his free arm and excused himself out of the conversation by hiding his face behind it. 

"Charlie?" Sam said after a moment of extremely tense, empathetic silence.  
  
The woman's head jumped up again in attention.  
"Yes?" she asked, sounding alarmed. 

"Make Garth check what cases they're on, too. All he can. Don't mention the nephil."


	9. Breaking Birds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear.  
>  And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.”  
>  \- Terry Tempest Williams

* * *

 

 

Dean couldn't remember when he'd last taken a sleeping pill to rest. That night he did, leaving Castiel to look after Anna and socialise with Henry, Grace and Jennifer in the study - the last he'd seen, they'd been taking turns reading to the children. The kids all seemed to be true Legacies of the Letters, at least if anything could be said by the way they loved stories beyond any other forms of entertainment. It was good, especially for Anna who had some issue concentrating on most other things: she was easily distracted by the desire to dig into something not fit for her digging, or by the sudden need to wrestle with someone who really did not want to wrestle with her.   
Within the past months she'd stopped setting fires entirely, although the fear always resided within Dean that she'd suddenly grow fond of the habit again. Castiel, on the other hand, was more optimistic about it. He said he wasn't entirely certain what skills and powers a full-grown nephil would have, but that setting fires didn't sound likely - it usually required a less solid connection between flesh and the spirit that resided within than what was true for nephilim. The more plausible explanation for Anna's "talent" had been the uncontrolled surges of energy flowing through her at times, resulting in generalised release upon the area she was currently in contact with that in turn heated the material up to the stage where it either burst into flame or melted, and these were not the signs of a true pyrokinetic ability.

"Can angels even do that? Set things on fire," Dean had asked him, realising the only memories of pyrokinesis that he could recall then were strictly demon-related.  
As a response, Castiel had set a used paper towel on fire. It had been good enough for Dean, who couldn't help but find it rather amusing that a vocal response had been beyond Castiel when his great skills were being questioned.

The thing about sleeping pills was that while they did work better at erasing the world from around Dean than alcohol could ever do, they also made him vulnerable while asleep by removing his awareness of the outside world near completely, and resulted in certain grogginess that followed him well into the next day. That was why he didn't necessarily fully wake up to the feel of the angel sitting on the bed on his side and placing the squirming bundle of warmth and sleep disturbance that Anna was between them before following them down and pulling Dean's blanket over them all. Instinctively, Dean brought his arm around Anna and briefly enjoyed the feel of Castiel's knees pressing against his thighs, locking their daughter in a space formed between them.  
Anna's palms patted around Dean's face and she said something, prompting a quiet chuckle from Castiel before the angel collected her hands inside his large palm and returned them to her space with a whispered "don't bother him, Anna" reaching Dean's barely aware ears.

The next time he woke up, his arm was still around the girl. She seemed to be sleeping soundly still, lips parted to and head turned to Castiel's side of the bed. Castiel wasn't there, but Dean didn't mind, as he soon slipped back to sleep, his body finding itself all but unable to wake up as long as the pill was still in his system.  
The third time came with Anna nuzzling her face against his chest and mumbling something in her sleep, and as Dean glanced at the clock and the 11:08 that quickly turned into 11:09, he figured it was about time he stopped being useless.  
  
Anna woke up much faster than he did at his best: the moment he shook her gently, calling her name to bring her in safe and sound, she flashed a waking smile and didn't even attempt to go back to sleep.  
He dressed her in a pair of thick winter pantyhose and her freshly washed favourite dress over them, clipped her hair back with a couple cheerfully patterned hair clips and told her to follow him into the kitchen. She did, insisting to hold his hand the whole way through, which due to her size was causing Dean quite a few complications to the journey.  
He picked her up at the kitchen door and waited until she'd climbed up on his shoulders, and once they were set, he opened the door to find both Sam and Castiel from inside.

"Katie," Anna cheered, letting go of Dean's head with one hand to reach for Castiel.

Dean tried not to burst out laughing, and by the look of it, Sam was holding back as hard as he was. Castiel, on the other hand, was perfectly neutral about being called by a girl's name. It was definitely progress to being just "Aa", and he'd worked hard to get it there - the last time Dean had heard her trying, Cas had still been "Cat", and at best, "Cat-tea". Dean had tried to convince him to teach her Dad instead, but Castiel seemed wary of the title or some implication it held and remained certain that some day, she'd call him Cas, and that it'd just require a little patience from Dean as he himself wasn't much affected by her slowness in embracing the difficult syllables.  
When they got closer, the girl spoke a mess of a word that didn't even resemble English. Sam raised a brow at her while Dean in turn raised his to Castiel. The angel's mouth twitched into half a smile.

"Enochian seems to be easier for her," he said near apologetically, then turning towards her and speaking a jumble that did sound more like the language, but was still absolutely undecipherable to Dean.

"Great," he grunted, "I'll teach her to speak something weird too so that I can converse with her in secrecy and block your sorry ass out next, Cas."

Castiel lowered his gaze, smiling.  
"She's hungry."

"Yeah, wow, good translating," Dean replied dryly, hand already on the fridge's door, "Freaking angels. Get her an apple from the basket and bring me some coffee, okay?"  
He picked out half a sandwich that was probably leftovers from Henry's breakfast - the kid had a bad appetite and Dean was more than alright with using what he left behind for Anna, who in turn had the appetite of someone twice her size and seemed to use the energy to the last drop because while she remained pudgy, she was by no means overweight.

"Daa," Anna uttered and her hand slipped into and over Dean's eye from the side he was holding her still on his shoulders, "Give."

"Sit still or you'll fall. We don't eat by the fridge. _We_ don't, even if my barbarian brother does," Dean grunted, eyeing Sam's breakfast that he'd just pulled from behind his back on the counter with well-visible amusement written over his expression.  
"Dude, the study is literally right behind that door. Was it really too far?"  
He didn't stay for an answer and instead turned to at least get himself and his hungry offspring to the proper dining environment.

"Wow, someone's grumpy," Sam huffed from behind them as they left.

"I suppose you would be too if Grace grew up speaking Korean with Jen, and then started using that exclusively whenever she'd be in the room," Castiel muttered guiltily, as if it had been his fault somehow that Anna had trouble with English.

 

* * *

 

Spring approached with the usual tides of filthy water running down the ramp of the garage's. Dean spent a few days trying to figure out how to enter the sewer, as it seemed to have lost its worth in containing the flood to the point where they couldn't really use the cars without risking the tide following them indoors. When he found it, he spent a good day's worth digging through a layer of disgusting waste that was clogging it up. Once it was clear Sam set in to make sure it wouldn't clog again.   
Castiel's time was mainly spent with his improvised excercise routines to keep Anna's development as stable as possible. Until then, Dean had stayed out of their way, somehow feeling like he'd rather not know what was going on, but after the winter's nephil elimination scare, he had started to realise that Castiel was right about a lot of things, and most of all, he was correct in that Dean could not make Anna human. Not even denial was going to turn her so, and the best way for him to raise her to be part of humanity regardless of the fact would be to actually know what he was up against.

He took the last required step when apple trees had started blooming around the bunker and other ground-bound flowers were popping up in the ditches and meadows in the area.

"Cas," he called from the door one day when they were preparing - he cut right in the middle of quite a lively Enochian conversation that frankly made him feel depressed and rejected already, well before he'd even managed to announce his intentions. He hadn't even looked inside yet, not knowing what to expect or if he was even welcome there now, so for a moment he just stood still listening to Castiel get up and approach until the door opened in full.

The angel seemed surprised to see him there, but not in a negative way.  
"Dean," he called with a careful smile, "Is everything alright?"

Dean nodded.  
"I was just - man, I was thinking... maybe I'd tag along with you guys."  
His eyes flickered to Anna, who was sitting on the large armchair with her outdoor pants tugged up one leg and still hanging down from the other. Her cheeks were burning red and she was trying her best to see past Castiel at what was happening by craning her neck and moving left and right to find a better angle. Castiel's surprise grew; his brows creased and he tilted his head with a questioning smile on his lips. Then, he glanced back at Anna, stayed so for a moment and spoke to her a word that Dean's brain slowly translated to English.

_'Meadow?'_ he asked her.

Anna nodded eagerly.  
The angel turned back to Dean and hesitated, looking like he'd done something wrong or in secrecy, and the corner of Dean's mouth rose up a little in response to the dejected expression of the older's.

"So?" he asked as cheerfully as he could.

Castiel's palm pressed against his cheek and the older brought him in for a lingering kiss that he responded to needily, as it felt like a soft plaster over the hurt that he was feeling in vain for Anna's preferences. He knew, consciously, that those things happened: one of them would be closer to her for a while, then the other would be favoured again. The language barrier that was closing in on them would even out in a while, as the vast majority of her communication with others was spoken exclusively in English, yet his subconscious still contained the ghosts of his fears of being pushed away and abandoned. It worked against him in situations like these and made him vulnerable in a manner that barely affected others, and where a person without his past could have simply sucked up the hurt and dealt with it, he was forced to live with a fear that he didn't know if would ever completely disappear. Castiel's affection made it so much better, reminding him at once of how loved he was and how much he was needed here, and of the fact that the angel would never allow him to be left out from what they had. He knew as much as Dean wanted it to be so that Anna needed the both of them, and that the two sides of her required the undivided attention from them to merge in full and give her a seamless identity with which she could eventually learn to live alongside and as a part of society.

"Of course," the angel said with a gentle huff, "I think it'd do her good to do this in English, too. A little practice on concentration and awareness cannot possibly hurt her."

Dean's smile widened.  
"I'll get my jacket, give me a minute."

 

* * *

 

"It's been about power for a while now. I teach her to carry, not to throw, and the difference between throwing something at someone and throwing something to them," Castiel explained, "It's building her interactive skills, I'm sure you've noticed. She plays with Henry differently from before."

"And with me, if I'm honest with you," Dean chuckled, sitting at the crook of an old apple tree.  
Castiel lowered a branch of it and examined the flowers for a moment, then let it spring up again. Anna was exploring as well - she wobbled around in the grass picking up things and planting them back again.  
  
"So - when are you - you know - starting?" Dean asked in a bit.

Castiel shrugged.  
"When she's ready," he said indifferently, "When she's bored with playing around, she'll want to be guided."

Dean turned to stare at him.  
"She actually grows bored with playing around at some point?"

"Yes," Castiel confirmed with a smile, eyes following the girl around, "and it won't take long anymore."

Indeed it did not. Soon enough Anna stood up, looked around for a moment biting her lower lip, and then, clearly deciding there was nothing further to do, walked to Castiel. She eyed Dean a little cautiously, then called him Daa and pursed her lips as if telling him he shouldn't be here.  
Castiel reached for her hand.  
"Anna," he called for her attention confidently, "What would you like to do today?"

"No."

Dean chuckled again. He slid down from the crook of the tree and knelt in front of her.  
"Hey, Anna. Show me what you can do. Something cool."

"Anna?" Castiel spoke in turn, catching her thoughtful attention effortlessly, "You could show him what we did yesterday."  
He turned to glance at Dean.  
"We weren't carrying rocks," he added as if concerned that might not be cool enough for Dean.

"Mmph," Anna commented, eyes somewhere up about the apple tree.  
Then she raised her hand and pointed.  
"That."

Castiel picked her up and brought her on level with the branch she'd been aiming for. Dean stood beside them trying to figure out what was going on, but before he could catch up on it, Anna had reached to grab the dangling end of a flowering branch. It was nearly cut off, only hanging by a thin breaking layer of soft, still green wood and bark. Anna creased her forehead and in a bit, her pupils filled with the silvery glow that Dean associated with her burning things or throwing over tables. Instinctively he would have wanted to take a step away, but Castiel's eyes kept him still. He followed the light as it gathered to the tips of the child's fingers and carefully, she pressed the stick back into the branch it belonged to, held it still as she reached to wrap her other hand around that point, and she closed her eyes and frowned hard until slowly, the light reached its peak and then faded.  
When she let go of the tree, the branch was unharmed and complete again.

The girl let out a satisfied, joyful little sound and brought her hands together in a sign of pride, looking at Castiel but almost immediately turning to watch Dean's reaction instead, her face turning to an expression of worry and expectation.  
Dean looked at her and tried to figure out the proper reaction, but then his eyes charged back to the tree and he forgot everything about child rearing.  
"That was frickin' awesome, Anna."

Anna's expression lit up and she laughed. Castiel let her down again and she stepped to Dean, hugging his knee for a bit before latching onto the jean and pulling him on.  
"See," she said and kept pulling.

"We should probably follow," the angel huffed.  
  
Dean felt like he'd eaten a whole bag of candies when he reached to take the older's hand in his, but what else could he have done?

 

* * *

 

The yellow glow of their bedroom's light became easier on the eyes when Dean turned it dimmer until it painted the room orange in entirety. He dropped his shirt on the chair and locked the door, turning then to look at Castiel who'd sat down on the bed with an expression of someone who was just barely grasping the younger's plan.  
  
A shy smile appeared on him when Dean opened up the zipper of his jeans, removed his socks and added the two of them on top of his shirt. Then the younger walked up to him, pushed aside the tan coat from his shoulders and settled on his lap with his knees pressing to the mattress on the angel's both sides, lips parted and his tongue making a short slide across the lower one in a manner that spoke of his anticipation.  
Castiel closed his eyes and breathed out, back arching as he relaxed into Dean's touches - the younger opened his shirt button by button just below the middle, slid his hands underneath for just a moment before then tugging it out of his black pants and opening the belt of them.  
That kind of a plotless, unorderly undressing was Dean's favourite; he touched wherever he wanted, revealing what he desired when he desired it, and he'd noticed it made Castiel quite aroused in the process. It seemed like this kind of a zigzagging tour along his body made him aware of its parts, and that he liked returning to one or the other at Dean's whim, as if to remind himself of the fact that yes, Dean enjoyed this just as much as the part that he'd just stopped touching, and that all of him was worth taking a second look at - that all of him was desirable.

"Did you notice she has some freckles over her nose?" Dean muttered against Castiel's jaw, already breathless as he reached to remove the last of his own clothes.

He pressed his naked body against the older's still clothed hips and shivered at the feel of it - there was something throughoutly enjoyable about being the one nude and yet feeling so in control. Power and vulnerability were things that he rarely felt together but here they were often one and the same, and the firm hands of the older's pressing against his waist made him feel safer still.

"She's had them all over her body for a while now," Castiel reminded him, smiling.

Dean pushed him back on the bed and nipped at his neck, opening a couple more of the buttons on his shirt.  
"I know," he breathed as he leaned to kiss him on the mouth, "It's just - the first time I saw so many of them there."

"She looks a lot like you."

"Mmh."

In the silence that followed the thought of Anna faded from Dean's mind, replaced by a quiet that he needed and came to Castiel to get; he pressed his hips against the growing hardness of the angel's and grinded their hips together, allowing small moans past his guard.  
The older held him by his hips, returning the small movements a little absently still as was typical for him - it took him longer to anchor himself in the moment, to get his mind cleared and to fully feel Dean there beside him. It was well worth working for. Dean knew few things that he loved more than the knowledge of reaching the angel through the skin little by little, touch by touch, until Dean became his whole world and the eternity around them closed from him.  
Castiel, while always present, was hardly ever fully _there_ , but when they slept together, Dean knew he had all of him.

The older was soon left with just the shirt on him that hung mostly unbuttoned and crooked upon his shoulders, one nipple exposed as Dean kept returning to it to circle it with the tip of his tongue, and it didn't take long from that moment for him to already spread his legs invitingly under the other, exposed hips raised in a begging manner to get what he needed. His eyes stayed upon Dean as the younger dug out the lube from the bedside table's drawer, spread it upon his fingers and returned to Castiel - without hesitation, he pressed the tip of his index finger against the older's flesh, rubbing the still cool but no longer cold liquid over him until finally pushing in.  
The angel let out a muffled little purr, one leg rising over Dean and dragging along his lower back to keep him right where he was, and Dean leaned against his chest and moved his finger inside him without hurry, just listening to him breathe and counting the shivers he sent with his touches.

When people complained that parenthood killed sex, they were absolutely right. Excluding the time when they'd reintroduced closeness into their relationship when Anna had still been a new addition, they'd lived the kind of a life that didn't allow them much time together like this. For Castiel, it was hardly a problem; he lacked the kind of a libido that bothered Dean seemingly entirely, and even though he did sometimes initiate sex, he was more often the one who got bothered into bed and turned on along the way there. Dean himself had been much too tired to even consider it on most evenings, perhaps especially because of the angel's relative disinterest in the activity, and he dealt with just his hand more than well if it meant he could still curl up next to the other when he went to sleep.  
Parenthood did not, however, turn sex worse or make it a chore. Not for them, anyway. Dean had never felt he got quite so close to Castiel before, like in raising Anna he'd accidentally found a bridge that made him understand the older much better than he'd done before. It was like Anna was the famed puzzle piece that finished a whole, made them full, and allowed Dean to see the entire picture. At the same time, Castiel seemed like he'd changed, too. Dean had never thought he was holding back before he'd seen him with Anna, and that courage and trust had slowly started to leak in between them as well. One of the most distinctive changes was that he'd never made the older laugh while their bodies were joined, yet now his stupid jokes had unexpectedly found their place naturally as any among the other words that were shared between them, scarce as they remained.  
  
There was hardly anything better than finding Castiel not only partaking in but clearly enjoying and desiring the different things they tried in bed. For a long while, Dean had loved giving him blowjobs for the sheer pleasure of reading the enjoyment from his body's instinctive responses, of feeling the encouragement that the other's fingers brought him as they tugged at his hair and caressed him all over while he was licking and sucking, and for experiencing the impatience that grew in the angel the closer he was brought to climax. Now Castiel had suddenly found his voice as well, and not only for moaning but for giving him feedback as well. Praise was something Dean sucked up like a sponge, and after the first time Castiel had started giving him exactly that, he'd made sure to tell him it had made him feel good: Castiel had taken the hint and if they'd lacked in communication before, now it definitely wasn't an issue. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that they were constantly explaining and announcing everything they did for Anna's sake, describing their mundane daily actions to detail like it was an exciting sports event whenever she was there to listen - and, if Dean was completely honest about it, often enough when she wasn't as well. It definitely made it hard to _stop_ talking, but if the result was this, then it was nothing but a positive change.

This time they didn't have much time to spare; the best they could give it was a stripped-down forty minutes, enough for Dean to make love to the older for a good ten minutes even after they'd undressed for an overly long while. To all of that they could still add a brief cuddle afterwards, but that was it; thankfully for the both of them, where briefness had at first meant goal-oriented achieving, it was now the embodiment of relaxation, learning to take what came and let go of the rest, and it seemed to charge them up instead of wearing them down.

"Cas," Dean muttered hesitantly as he stepped out from under the now turned-off shower and grabbed his towel, "Have you heard anything of... you know. The God squad."

Castiel glanced at him, towel visiting the behind of his ear and then the other as Dean watched. He could have well cleaned himself with nothing but a surge of angelic power with the bonus of suddenly wearing clothes as well, but during his time as a human he'd learned to enjoy showers - especially when he could share them with Dean. He'd never once skipped it after sex, accepting the washing as part of the routine that belonged to it as inseparably as foreplay did.

"I haven't. I will try, if you take care of Anna while I'm gone."

"Of course I'll take care of her."

"I might be gone for a few days."

"Okay."  
Dean grimaced.  
"If that's what it takes."

 

* * *

 

**Fourth year**

Castiel landed amongst such a thick crowd that nobody noticed his sudden appearance. He cast a worried look to left and right but found no suspicious-looking aura amongst those that walked beside him, and no angels were to be seen where he stood.  
Still nervous, he started walking towards the mall: snowflakes fell from the overcast sky in thick clumps, and while he knew where he was, it didn't feel like the right place to be.  
The entrance was but a box trapped in a hurricane of heat as the electric system tried to keep the December chill away from the indoors area. Castiel found it bothersome more than anything and passed through with quick steps, only to find that the mall itself was heated, as Dean would have phrased it, to hell and back again. In contrast to the weather outside he could have sworn it was a prank played by someone who wished to see old people collapse from temperature-induced shock.

She was in here somewhere - and yet, even after months of tracking, Castiel still had no idea of how to approach her, or even if she'd allow him to. She did have a child to protect, after all. Castiel knew well how he would have been in a situation like that, Anna by his side and maybe Dean as well, with another angel suddenly appearing from the crowd. He knew exactly how that would go, but he hoped he could convince Diniel to at the very least hear him out before they'd come to blows.

Christmas was the worst season to track angels in malls: this was one of the first things Castiel realised as he wandered through the crowd to the second floor. The worst was that in case there _would_ be a fight, it would happen here, in the middle of hundreds of people. Casualties and witnesses were all but guaranteed. At the end of the escalator he found himself hesitating: were his questions truly worth the risk? When she would leave, he'd lose her again, perhaps for good this time. More than once, she'd left the whole continent only to return for some reason - perhaps another child, as seemed likely, one that she could not take with her. The one she'd taken was not hers like Anna was Castiel's, but she raised him like he had been; she'd killed for him already, more than once. That had been how Castiel had found her in the first place. The angels wanted her dead and were more than willing to share information about her, but little did they know that Castiel soon found out more than they'd ever hoped for yet brought none of it back to them. He did not seek her to kill her, nor did he seek her to kill her son. He sought her because he needed to not be alone anymore, to find a place where he could speak the truth for once and most of all, to find someone who could shed some light on what would become of Anna.  
Her powers grew so fast she barely had the time to be human at all, and even though Castiel wished he could have given her his undivided attention, the circumstances would never allow such a devotion unless he did what Diniel had done.

And if it would come to that, he would do that, too. If it would be the only way to give Anna a life in which she could be content, he would take her with him and disappear.

From amongst the crowd, just when Castiel had decided his questions were worth taking at least the initial risk of entering, a familiar light shone through to him. He pushed aside someone he could not spare a thought for and then another, moving quickly towards the light before it would disappear. Beside it, suddenly as if appearing from nowhere, shone another aura. It wasn't that of an angel and it definitely wasn't that of a human, but it looked nothing like Anna's, either.

Diniel turned and he could already see the blade slipping out her sleeve. The people around them had not yet noticed anything out of the usual, and Castiel wanted to give them a warning - any warning; fire, gun, bomb - just to get them all out, but Diniel -

"Do not approach him. Do _not_ come closer. This is the only warning I will give you."

She did not seem to even recognise him, and he knew why. Despite her flawless vessel, her true form was scarred from recent battles and her wings looked as if someone had tried to burn them away now that they'd finally regenerated. She wore a white blindfold over her eyes to take away her normal vision, allowing only the angelic knowledge of her surroundings through. It made sense: in this manner, the shapes and colours and lights of her environment did not matter. The only thing she now saw was Castiel's form, and the souls of the people passing her by as smaller, dimmer figures.

"Diniel," Castiel called, taking a single step back in an attempt to convey to her that he was not a threat, "I don't want any harm to come to -"

"Leave. _Leave._ He is not yours to take!"

The younger angel glanced towards the crowd that was starting to stare. This would go nowhere, not here, not now, and he did not wish to make it worse. With an aura of defeat he took another step back and started to turn, but just as he did so, a flash of light pierced through his vessel and against the form of his grace. His blade slid out - he didn't have a choice, he'd been attacked in a manner that caused his grace to react. Before he could pull it back, Diniel was on him; he raised the blade to block her attack, but from the side, another flash of light passed him, setting the floor on fire.  
Everything around him turned to slow motion, even the sounds disappeared. Castiel looked at the boy standing behind Diniel, his eyes glowing bright white and veins pulsing with it. All of that was engulfed in a blast that all but cleared the room of people, sending them flying to the walls and windows and the displays of the stores around them. Castiel could hear Diniel's command to stop - they were still holding blades together - but the boy was too scared; he couldn't have been older than ten yet he had strength that seemed to parallel Castiel's own.

_Diniel, please - I did not come to harm you, nor did I come for him. Stop this. I beg of you._

Diniel's blade brought his down and he could see the grief in her.

_Stop this?_ she replied to him through the line of communication with which he'd reached for her, blocked from the ears of humans and, hopefully, the nephil as well. _I cannot stop_ anything. _I cannot control_ him.

Castiel's feet met solid ground and he realised he'd been pushed quite a lengthy distance by the blast as well. Diniel had stopped earlier, and their blades stayed in front of them both, facing each other as they were.

People stumbled by them, all of who still could, dripping blood and in panic; Castiel tried to make way for them, but wherever he went, the nephil was taking aim at him and he couldn't move from his position by the end of the stairs towards which everyone was heading for.

_There are rumours, Castiel. Is that why you're here?_

"Damian! Hold. _Hold._ "

_What have you gotten yourself into now? What madness could have possibly caused you to create something like him?_

Castiel hesitated. He cast a glance towards Damian and saw that the boy was not holding, or at least he was not holding _back_. Castiel knew that he had no other choice butto kill them both - the alternative was to let the boy kill everyone in sight, and there was no way for them all to get out before that would happen.

_Love_ , he responded heavily, mind barely on the conversation he was still caught up in with Diniel.

_They always said you were broken_ , Diniel spoke in turn with a smile.  
She lowered her blade.  
 _Perhaps this will teach you the lesson nothing else could._

In the blinding light that followed her words, Castiel could feel the souls passing around him. He charged forth, blade cutting down first the angel in front of him and then, although he felt as if he was on fire himself, the boy behind her.  
The light faded like smoke. Somewhere further away, a woman was crying. Castiel turned towards her and saw a hall littered with blood and twisted corpses, and although he felt like he couldn't move, he found himself walking - stumbling - over the bodies of small children and young and old men and women with their eyes, if still present at all, staring blankly at the white ceiling - guilt and sadness weighted in him as he knelt in front of the hysterical woman in her early twenties, trying to hold inside her intestines that were falling out through the wound that the broken reinforced glass into which she'd fallen had cut into her. He pushed her ice cold hand aside and pressed his in place of it, and he looked into her eyes as if trying to apologise through it all but finding no words to speak at all. Energy flowed from him but he found it lacking, suddenly realising that the blast had injured him as well. He was bleeding, not sure from where, but his grace mixed in with the blood that was draining from his vessel, and although he saw the wound on the woman's belly growing smaller and the film keeping her intestines inside her reforming, she was still bleeding heavily.

"Fight," he heard himself saying to her as he placed her hand back over the wound along with the sleeve of her hoodie to make the blood flow slower. "I never wanted it to end like this."

He wasn't sure if his wings would take him where he had to go, but the world was turning less vivid by the minute and he had no other choice but to pray that they would.

 

* * *

 

"Cas!"  
Dean threw over the chair he'd sat next to as he jumped up and charged to the unmoving shape on the floor between the stairs. He heard Sam getting up behind him through the thundering sounds of his blood rushing inside him; the pain that falling on the floor and sliding sluggishly along it for the last few inches before his knees rooted to the surface right next to Castiel was like a distant acknowledgement that had little to do with him.  
"Sam - he's... bleeding."

By bleeding, Dean did not mean the blood. The blood meant little to him, although by instinct alone he did react to it just like his conscious part reacted to the light that spilled from the wounds. He took Castiel upon his lap, pushed aside the trench and opened the shirt so hastily that one of the buttons fell on the floor - none of it mattered, he just needed to see how he was wounded: if there was anything he could do.  
The angel's body seemed as if someone had bumped into him with a truck; his skin was bruised and swelling, the shapes of the injury like a print of a wildfire. Sam had knelt next to them but couldn't do much; they had no first aid for injured angels. To date, they weren't sure if anything like that existed at all.

"Cas?" Dean called again, hearing his voice become choked and faint, "Cas, c'mon, wake up."  
Nothing happened. In a moments time, Dean raised his eyes to Sam and shivered.  
"Help me carry him to the bedroom. Don't let anyone in. _Anyone_ , Sam."

"Alright."

The body of an adult man had always been the last thing Dean had wanted to carry - they were heavy and near impossible to hold. Castiel's, unlike most others', did not make him want to let go and walk away. He was clinging onto it as much as he was carrying it. Slowly the two of them managed to get the angel on Dean's bed; Sam left the room promising he'd get Kevin back to the tablet the second he could find him, and Dean couldn't demand anything further. There was nothing further to do but wait. Despite the uselessness of it, Dean killed time by patching the older's wounds: he found them oddly shallow, barely cutting into the skin at most parts, but each one of them was leaking grace and the glow was growing fainter by the minute.  
  
When there was no wound left open, he curled up next to the male and held him close, pressing Castiel's head into his chest with his own chin buried in the angel's hair.

He breathed and breathed with his back turned towards the clock that he had not even glanced towards when they'd entered - there was no telling how long it took, and as time passed, however quick or slow, Dean started to doubt his heart would be able to take the stress that kept it racing minute after minute and what felt like day after day but could have been just another ten minutes, an hour or two.  
When he noticed Castiel growing colder, he pulled the blanket over them and closed his eyes, sending a small prayer to the only being that could help a wounded angel, ignoring for once the fact that He would not listen. A father had to love his sons. This son, out of the lot of them, was one that surely needed it the most.

Hoping that the door would open to announce the tablet had miraculously offered them a solution when it thus far had dealt with nothing of particular interest since the Fall, Dean found himself drifting into a state that resembled sleep or some kind of slumbering, hypnotised by the sound of Castiel breathing, however faded the sound seemed to be.  
At first he struggled, but to what end? His eyes closed against his will and he couldn't get them open anymore. The angel's fingers latched onto his shirt and he fell asleep.

 

* * *

 

"Dean...?"  
Dean shivered, palm sliding along the bandaged waist of the older's. He opened an eye, not quite certain where he was. Sam was there: Sam was looking at him, worried.  
"Dean - I'm sorry," the younger muttered, casting a glance back.

All warmth charged from Dean's body and his eyes turned towards the angel he was still holding there, expecting to see that he'd slipped away while he'd slept, but Castiel was still breathing, still sleeping, still _alive_.  
This all took him the brief two seconds Sam had needed to continue, only proving how ready Dean had been to hear the worst news and how much he'd expected them. For good reason, yet somehow the angel seemed to be stronger now than when Dean had last taken proper note. There was nothing in particular to tell him that it was so, but he could _feel_ it, as if something in his presence had changed for the better.

"... I can't get Anna to stop crying. I think she - I think she knows, nobody told her but she... Please, we need you with her."

Dean blinked, confused, as if he'd for the time being forgotten he had a daughter in the first place. Then the conflict settled in; he couldn't take her here, yet he couldn't leave Castiel's side either. Leaving her alone didn't seem like it was an option. He shivered again and realised he was feeling sickly and weak, and when he attempted to get up his horizon swayed, landing him back in bed. Sam frowned.  
  
"Dean?"

"Yeah - yeah, I'm good - don't worry about me."  
It had to be the fear and the stress and everything else he was packing in.  
"You think she - knows?"

"Yeah," Sam confirmed, shifting uncomfortably and eyeing Dean in the manner he did when he knew Dean was bullshitting him, but truly, if there had ever been a person _not_ in need of the attention turning towards him, it was Dean now. "She keeps saying it's her fault, and we can't get her to explain what's her fault, but - she's crying for him, so... 1+1, right?"

Dean was quite certain he had fever.  
"Bring her here," he muttered, landing his head back on the pillow with a weary sigh, "I think... Cas would want her to be with us."  
He swallowed and closed his eyes.  
"I think I want her to be here, too."

When he next looked at Sam, the younger's expression told him exactly how well he'd read into everything Dean was not saying.  
"I'll bring her," he said then, "Do you want something else? A - a hot drink or something?" 

Dean shook his head, and then briefly after, nodded.  
"Something with alcohol," he grimaced, "not much, just... please, Sam." 

The younger's smile was crooked and faded fast.  
"Alright." 

Dean fell back into the half-sleeping state for the few minutes it took for nothing to happen. At the end of it, the door opened with a quiet creak and he saw Sam patting Anna on the back and saying something inaudible to her. Her face was spotted with red and her eyes looked puffy, but at least she'd stopped crying. In her hands she held a large mug with steam rising out of it, and Dean wanted to throw something at Sam for allowing her to carry something that heavy and dangerous, but the man had already closed the door.

Anna reached over the bed's edge with the mug and Dean took it from her with a small smile on him, feeling the heat from his own cheeks as he moved, and his nose felt like it was on fire from the inside. He'd never learned to get sick at the right time.

Between them, Castiel was still asleep, or whatever the state he was in could be called. As Dean adjusted against the end of the bed, Anna climbed on it and crawled between them, bringing back up the blanket with Dean's help after she'd had to kick it aside. She latched onto Castiel with both hands and curled up against him, burying her head under his chin and starting to sob silently again, something Dean had never yet seen her do. He couldn't even say anything to her and instead kept attempting to drink from his mug, but the drink was still too hot to pass through his lips or even touch them before he was pulling away, unwilling to risk the burn.

"He's gonna be okay, Anna," he heard himself saying at the end of a too long silence, "He's just - he's just tired." 

Anna let out a sound that could have been anything from a vocal sob to a sound of agreement or disagreement. Dean kept trying to drink.  
"How did Sam let you carry this?" he asked then. 

"I wanted."

"That's not okay, Anna. It's really hot and it's heavy, too. You could have hurt yourself."

"I wanted." 

"Well, that was..."  
He meant to say 'stupid' and he meant to say 'don't do that again' and then 'I'm going to kill Sam', but what came out was none of that.  
"Kind. Thanks, kiddo."  
He swallowed and managed to dip his lips into the drink that was tiptoeing the not so very fine line between being juice with vodka and being vodka with juice.

Anna nuzzled her face against Castiel before slowly sitting up to stare at Dean instead. Her small hand was still on the angel's arm and her fingers made small grabbing motions upon it, picking up some flesh and letting it fall back down again. Seemed that the vessel was at the very least not running out of hydration, as the skin that she raised fell back down immediately instead of smoothing out sluggishly.  
"Anna - I don't think it's okay to pinch him even if he's asleep." 

"Mm."  
She stopped, looking at the angel with a small frown, as if not having realised what she was doing or that it could be painful. Dean tried to avoid looking at him entirely because of the pain that flooded in him each time that he did - he was tired, and not only physically, but also of being afraid. He reached a mug-burnt hand to Castiel and pushed his fingers amongst his hair, rubbing and tugging gently, eyes turning towards the photo he had on the table of himself with his mother. It looked a little dusty.   
As he kept staring, he found the edges of his vision turning blurry; it wasn't from tears - he'd noticed none would come out no matter how much he would have preferred them to fall now, if only to easen how he felt inside. He tried to blink to get the misty glow out, but it didn't fade and in fact kept growing. With a jump inside his chest he raised his head and slowly turned to look at Anna. 

The girl had both her hands on Castiel's body and she looked teary and concentrated, her eyes glowing with the silvery light, palms emitting light between herself and Castiel. She breathed in huffs, unsteadily and like under great strain.  
"Anna?" Dean asked, barely daring to lay his hand over the girl's shoulder.  
She was trembling. 

"I'll help," she whimpered with a sob, shaking her head to get the tears to fall out, "I'll make him better."  
She added some Enochian that flowed much better than her English, which still stumbled and blurred. 

"Anna... I don't think... I don't think you can," Dean tried, afraid she'd end up hurting either herself or Castiel by straining too hard.

"I can." 

"Anna, seriously," but seriously what, Dean wasn't quite sure.  
He swallowed thickly, thinking for a fleeting moment that he'd need to ask Castiel what he thought of this, but then he realised that he couldn't for the sole reason that it was _Cas_ who needed help now. The realisation left him feeling dull and hollow and more afraid than he'd been before: he felt so entirely alone and the possibility of losing Castiel suddenly overwhelmed him like a tidal wave. It left him cold and he felt sicker than he had before.  
Anna's light flickered like a broken lamp. She sobbed again, bringing one hand from the angel's side to wipe her face across its arm, and then she pressed it back over the male but seemed to be unable to conjure up enough energy to keep her powers up anymore.

"I _can_ ," she insisted, although no one had complained.

Dean laid the mug on the bedside table and brought both his arms around the shaking child. Her hands slid down from Castiel's sides and she crawled onto Dean instead, legs slipping around his hips and fingers grabbing his shirt as she broke into tears and started crying. She was repeating something in Enochian that Dean simply could not make any sense out of, and sometimes her fists collided with his chest out of sheer frustration, but there was nothing she could do, she was simply too small to even begin to affect a being like her father.

"It's okay, Anna," Dean muttered into her hair and held her tight, eyes on Castiel but his whole concentration upon their daughter instead, "When he wakes up, we'll tell him you tried."

"I can help," she blurted to Dean's shirt, "I can, I can, I can, I can heal tree, I can heal Katie. I can." 

"Anna... Cas is not a tree. Cas is an angel."

"I _can._ "

"Baby? Sometimes you just - sometimes you just can't. And it's okay. It's okay."


	10. Slice of that Pie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ."”  
>  _\- C. S. Lewis: The Four Loves_

* * *

 

Dean stayed up the whole night: Anna fell asleep on his lap and he didn't try to relocate her, not even when his buttocks and thighs grew numb and he couldn't feel most of his waist either. The best moment of the whole seemingly endless flow of hours was the time Castiel shifted, and at contact with Dean's hand wrapped his fingers between the younger's. That was the worst position for Dean to stay in, but he had everything right where he wanted it to be, so he didn't budge. At the point where the timer on the wake-up lamp started imitating sunrise he found himself tired enough to fall asleep, and as gently as he could, he slipped down from the near torturous position he'd stayed in until then and, with Anna fast asleep between himself and Castiel, curled up with his hand still joined with the angel's. The white light didn't bother him now and despite the growing glow of it he drifted out of consciousness, not nearly to a refreshing state of sleep but somewhere close enough to pass for rest.

He woke up in a bit to an aching feeling inside his bones and to the sound of the door opening. Sam walked over, clearly thinking they were all asleep, and Dean managed to jumpscare him by staring back at him when he reached the bed.

"Goddamnit, Dean," the younger hissed with a grimace.

"You need a shave," Dean muttered, eyes unable to leave the sight of the untrimmed beard on the other.

Sam's mouth twitched.  
"I was going to the bathroom, actually," he huffed, "but I thought I'd check on you first. Is... everything okay?"

"No," Dean replied, closing his eyes, "I'm sick and Cas is dying but nothing's really changed from yesterday, except that Anna stopped crying sometime after midnight. Figure she's going to start again when she wakes up, and for the record, since I'm sick and therefore excused, I'm probably going to start around then too."  
He peered at Sam through a small slit opening between the lids of his right eye.  
"I'm so fucking done, Sam. I'm just trying to have something - something where no one gets hurt - and then the life comes back in like it always does, by fucking _killing someone I love._ The hell did I do to deserve this?"

Sam shrugged.  
"I don't know, Dean."  
He hesitated.  
"He seems stable."

"He stopped bleeding." 

Sam nodded.  
"I'll bring you another cup of that," he muttered with a nod towards the now empty mug on the table. 

Dean's brain sparked into life and he cast a glare at Sam.  
"Why the fuck did you let her carry it?" he asked. 

Sam's mouth bent into an apologetic smile.  
"I knew you'd be angry," he chuckled, "but it was the only way I could get her to calm down. She handled it just fine, Dean." 

"She could have fucking burnt herself."

"And I figure she could have just healed the burn all the same. You need to let her grow. She can carry a mug to you if she wants to. It wasn't all too full either, and I made sure she was careful, that she knew to take it slow." 

Dean growled. His head ached and his neck felt stiff like death.  
"Just get me another." 

"Sure."

"She's barely fucking four, Sam," the older gnarled to the taller's turned back.

"I know," Sam replied casually as he reached the door, "She can also knock over a couch and throw things across a hall precisely to the mark should there be a need." 

Dean rolled his eyes and brought an arm around Anna's limp body. She made a sound and kneed him in the thigh, which probably hurt more than it actually should have because of how oversensitive Dean's skin remained. When the door closed, Dean allowed his eyes to do so as well. Despite the fact he'd slept badly - if what he'd had could be called sleep at all - and had fever, he still felt like he was sleeping for three and that it wasn't quite normal. His fingers had parted from Castiel's hand but before relaxing and tuning back into the state of rest that he could conjure up from next to nothing, he took it back in his and enjoyed the warmth of the angel's fingers against the back of his palm that simultaneously felt cold and too hot.  
  
He had a half-waking dream with his ears hallucinating sounds from where there were none, and with an army of unclear thoughts racing to the front of his mind pretending to be reality; for a while he thought that he was certainly late from whatever, but when he tried to figure out the exact thing he was missing out on, he realised it had been nothing but a dreaming thought. Next came the realisation he'd forgotten to give Cas his medication and he'd already opened his eyes to do just that when he remembered there was no medication to give, and with heaviness building inside he dropped back on the bed. Before long, Anna was waking up with a yawn and another kick against him, bringing him over the edge and returning him back to the world of the living.  
He reached a finger for the tip of her freckled nose and smiled. 

"Morning, sunshine."

"Mm."  
Anna got on her knees and turned to look at Castiel, her lips pouting and the back of her palm turning to wipe at her nose, probably to get rid of an itch rather than anything potentially disgusting. She made another thoughtful sound before reaching for the angel and caressing his cheek with a serious look on her face.  
  
"I want to wake him up." 

"Yeah, me too," Dean muttered, fingers turning around the girl's waist to keep her from doing anything he didn't want her to do, "but he needs to rest."  
 _And I don't want to know if he can't wake up._  

Anna bit her lip and moved into a proper sitting position - she leaned her back onto Dean's stomach and started gnawing at her fingertip.

"Stop," Dean grunted, "you'll ruin your nails."   
Anna glanced at him and kept doing it anyway. He wrestled her hand away from her mouth and resumed looking at Castiel. 

_Come on, Cas, wake up._

Dean pulled the blanket that had fallen from his side and Anna alike over Castiel in full, sat up and tugged the hems of it under the older's body so that no cold air would reach him. Despite still being fully clothed, he felt cold and shivered himself, but he'd need to get Anna fed and bathed regardless of how he felt. Castiel would probably stay alive while he'd be gone: he didn't seem to be actively engaged in the process of dying now, just completely taken by the damaged state of coma that seemed to be typical for him.

"He's like a robot sometimes," Dean muttered, readying himself to get off the bed no matter how hard his joints screamed against such efforts, "Just turns off when he's hurt and stays that way. Anna? Let's go brush your teeth."

"I don't wanna." 

"Nobody wants to," Dean huffed in turn, landing his feet succesfully upon the floor and helping the girl out of the bed after him, "It's just that we have to."

 

* * *

 

The room felt warmer than the corridor when Dean came back in, carrying the still steaming hot mug that Sam had handed to him half-way through to the bathroom with Anna. Now he'd managed to convince the girl that watching cartoons on a Saturday was a brilliant idea, and Sam had lent Henry to accompany her. He'd taken his laptop and joined them and Jennifer in the media room, leaving Kevin huddled over his translations in the study which seemed to fit the prophet well as he'd barely got more sleep than Dean in his ceaseless attempts at deciphering any portion of the tablet that could possibly turn out helpful for them.

The door creaked again when Dean shut it, adding a mental note in his crowded mind to get the hinges greased at some point. He walked to the side of the bed and sat down next to Castiel, free hand reaching to caress the older's cheek much like Anna had done earlier, just with more confidence and weight in the movement.  
"Cas," he muttered and sipped his drink, eyes lost as they tried to find a place in the room that did not hurt to look at, "If you're going to wake up, ever, now's as good time as any. I'm here with you, even if you won't." 

The angel breathed in deep and let it all out in a heavy, lengthy exhale. Then he shivered and in a tired, uncertain manner that stopped Dean's heart for a few beats, opened his eyes.  
In the white light of the lamp still heating up the room and making it brighter than it perhaps should have been, the blue in his eyes was clear even through the barely open lids. His eyes sought focus and a tiny muffled grunt escaped his throat, arm twitching in a failed attempt at movement. Dean's hand abandoned the spot it had halted upon to reach for the older's hand instead, and he felt a smile on him, although he still feared what would come next.  
  
"Morning, Cas," he spoke chokedly, turning the male from his side over onto his back so that he could more effortlessly look at him. 

The angel's mouth curved into the faintest of smiles and he closed his eyes once they'd taken in the sight of Dean.  
"Anna," he mumbled. 

"Anna's good, Cas," Dean said in turn, "She's with Sam." 

Castiel nodded, then fell silent and unmoving for a good while during which Dean drank more out of his mug, suddenly finding his appetite growing.  
"Damn," the younger said then, not sure if his voice was amused or just terrified, "For a moment there, I thought... I thought I lost you. Again." 

"Not... yet, it seems," Castiel responded slowly, "And I've... I've yet to learn my lesson." 

"Your lesson on what?" 

"Keeping... secrets." 

Dean drowned a wave of nausea in the vodka.  
"Yeah, about that."  
He placed the mug on the bedside table near precisely where it had sat the previous evening, the spot announced by a purple ring that its bottom had left behind on the wooden surface.  
"What the hell happened, Cas?" 

The angel grimaced, and Dean wasn't certain if it was from what he was thinking or from the pain he couldn't not be feeling.  
"I went looking for Diniel," he told him, yet the information held zero value to Dean who had no idea who Diniel was, besides likely being an angel by the sound of the name, "She... was said to have one... like Anna." 

"Huh? A nephil?"  
Dean frowned.  
"So Team Annihilation told you this and you - you what?" 

Castiel looked at him and Dean couldn't remember when he'd last seen so much pain in his eyes.  
"I thought she could help," he admitted ashamedly. 

Dean stared.  
"Help? With _what_? With Anna? You went to some _angel_ to ask for help with Anna?"

"Not... necessarily," Castiel breathed out, his voice shattering and body trembling as he strained to stay conscious.

Dean nearly told him to stop, but he needed answers too badly to allow him rest just yet.  
"I wanted... to see. See how they grow up; what they become, how... how she was handling the boy. I was looking for answers, and instead... I... It's all my fault. I knew it was... I didn't think it would escalate to the point it did, but I did... I did understand the risk. And I took it, I thought - I thought my cause was worth the sacrifice. It was not. So many died, and it... it's all my fault." 

"What the hell are you talking about?" 

Castiel closed his eyes and smiled, but there wasn't a shade of happiness in his tortured expression.  
"I'm cursed, Dean," he said quietly, almost contently, "Wherever I go... hundreds die." 

 

* * *

 

That brand of guilt was far from new to Dean. He sat on the bed drinking his vodka-juice in quiet, afraid to even think of what the older's words could possibly mean yet aware of the fact that whether or not he liked it, he would soon enough know; "hundreds" did not die quietly.  
In fact, perhaps Castiel was right. If he'd just waltzed in somewhere and witnessed - or caused - yet another massacre, it sure started to look like events like that followed him and that maybe, just maybe, he'd be better off firmly tied to someone with the opposite effect. That someone wasn't Dean, and Dean wasn't chaining him to anyone else. After regaining his grace Castiel had felt unworthy of it, scared of screwing up again, and here they were, as if it had been foretold. 

Certainly, he did have a talent for wreaking havoc. The sad part was that it was often not the direct result of himself, but rather some force that he pushed into action, yet after the time he'd _chosen_ to destroy, the guilt had already grown into him and the blame into the rest of what happened around him. Dean had forgiven, or rather, he liked to forget. He was good at that - at taking those he loved back to him whatever the cost, and burying their faults six feet under to rebuild a sense of comfort around them.  
Now his fingers bent into the once more unconscious angel's hair more for his own sake than Castiel's, and when the drink was finished, he felt at least ready to face the truth, if not quite up to the task of dealing with the consequences of if. 

He ran into Kevin on the way to the media room. From the look of him, Dean knew that he knew already.  
"You'd better come see the news," the younger spoke in the tone that could spell nothing but doom. 

The kids had been locked in the study with Linda Tran, who cast a quick look at Dean as they passed and then pretended to have not even noticed. A shiver ran down Dean's spine and it had nothing to do with his sickness as they turned around the corner and continued walking towards the media room.  
Inside, Sam cast a troubled look at him.  
"Did you know?" he asked. 

"I still don't," Dean grunted uncomfortably and settled on the couch. 

"Right, well."  
Sam rewinded to a previously recorded program, and on the screen Dean could see flashes of police-taped entrance to some large building as well as the faces of people talking about whatever it was that they thought had happened.  
"They're saying it was a terrorist attack." 

Dean didn't even bother asking what anymore. He simply grunted again and braced himself to view the news report when the rewind finished.  
What he saw made his stomach turn.

 

* * *

 

"How did that happen?"  
Dean's fingers gripped Castiel's shoulders so that there was no chance that he wasn't bruising him further, but he couldn't stop trembling and he felt like he wasn't in control, and the fact was the least of his worries.  
The angel reached to touch his arm, fingers bending around the toned form weakly as he looked at the younger's face with a lost look on his own. 

"He was scared," Castiel replied incoherently, breathing in huffs and seeming like inhaling caused him pain, "Diniel couldn't hold him back. She'd told me to leave and I - I tried, Dean, but he attacked. It barely wounded me, but... when he saw my blade, he - and Diniel as well. She tried to kill me to calm him down before it'd be too late, but I resisted, and... his powers, they were much beyond what I expected. A full-powered angel can cause devastation like that, Dean. I would have never guessed a boy not yet in his... and I... I had to kill him, Dean. It was too late; they were all dead, but I did it, I thought I still had time, that... He was just a boy. I could feel him when he died, and he was scared, nothing else." 

Dean tried to remain angry. Anger was so much more satisfying than fear, but fear was what he got regardless of his desires.  
He sat down and breathed, eyes closed, realising the door was still open and Sam had just walked in after hanging at the midway point for this whole time. 

"You should have been more careful," the younger brother spoke, kneeling by the bed beside Dean and in front of Castiel, "Why did you confront them there?" 

Castiel swallowed and Dean could _feel_ how his breath rasped.  
"I had no other choice," Castiel told him, "but when I saw how crowded the place was, I was about to turn. Then I - I made a miscalculation. I thought it - I thought it'd at worst injure the bypassers, should my plan go wrong. Perhaps I'd need to kill them, but I didn't realise... I could have never thought he'd have such a tremendous amount of power hidden within." 

"How old was he?" Dean asked, feeling faint.  
His fever had to be climbing again and he felt so sick he just wanted to lie down and sleep. 

"Barely ten, if even that."

"Goddamnit. Goddamnit, Cas."  
He couldn't contribute with anything more intelligent than that. He simply had no words, all his thoughts concentrated on their little girl who was day by day growing closer to becoming what the boy had been.  
"So that's why they kill them. They're afraid." 

"No," Castiel mumbled, and Sam cast a worried look at Dean as he saw him growing closer to unconsciousness again.  
Dean couldn't argue with him.  
"They kill them because they believe they're blasphemous. Which... they are." 

The angel drew a sharp breath and sounded for a moment like he couldn't let it out at all again, but with a shiver that shook his whole body it finally released in a wavering sigh. 

"Cas..."  
Dean took his hand and swallowed thickly.  
"Thank you. For... for being honest, I guess, for telling us. Just... rest up, okay? Can't afford to lose you, man." 

The younger wondered why he had such a hard time letting his feelings show whenever Sam was there - all he wanted to do was to kiss Castiel on his chapped lips and hold him and be afraid and worry and have him close to reassure him that he was still in fact alive, but all of that was impossible as long as his brother stayed with them.  
Castiel's fingers wound up tighter around his palm.  
"I'll be alright, Dean."  
He huffed and closed his eyes, brows knitting closer to a pained expression that soon settled again.  
"I don't know if you know it," he muttered then, already half gone from them, "if you ever made... a conscious decision, but you're lending me the strength to live. You should rest, too. You must feel... terrible." 

Dean exchanged a surprised look with Sam.  
"That's why I'm sick?" he asked Castiel. 

"It weakens you. Possibly," the angel replied.  
In the next fifteen seconds of silence, he was gone again. 

"Well, fuck everything," Dean commented and stood up, leaving Sam by Castiel's bed alone.

 

* * *

 

"Where's Jen?" Dean asked, breaking a silence that had lasted well over ten minutes.

Sam raised his eyes up to him and Dean could almost feel him thinking: _why are you washing dishes by hand?_  
Instead of asking that, he returned to the pile of notes he'd brought from the older's bedroom.  
"She," he started absently, "Um, Jen started at her new job today, remember? She'll be home around six." 

Dean's hands sunk under the greyish water of the sink. Then, slowly, he raised them out, shook most the water off and wiped them to a towel before turning around.  
"No, I don't remember."  
He stared at Sam like he'd lost his mind, but at least this new bit of information had taken his mind off of the massacre.  
" _Job?_ " 

"Yeah, Dean. Job. She's a grade school teacher." 

Dean blinked.  
"Really?" 

"Yes, for the third time," Sam chuckled disbelievingly, "I've been saying she's starting - Dean, do you ever listen to what I say?" 

The older shrugged.  
"Not really," he admitted and turned back to finish with the dishes.  
  
He wanted to ask if she knew, but of course she knew. If she was there out in the world of normal people, the only topic of the day would be what they liked to believe was a terrorist attack. Hundreds of casualties, civilians wounded and dead, smack in the middle of Christmas preparations: mothers, daughters, sons, fathers, sisters, brothers... Dead because of a suicide bomber.  
Or, more accurately a nephil, triggered by Castiel. Dean's eyes burned and he wiped across them with his bare arm, finding it unusually useless for the purpose of drying the tears. For a moment there, he'd thought they were over this. Over the thousands dead and dying phase, no more sacrifices, no more casualties, no more guilt to add to the burden they bore.

Was he angry?  
What else could he have been?  
He was livid, and the only person he could be angry with was Castiel. He seemed to never learn to talk, no matter how many times it proved to be the worst choice to make. He would always go out there and fuck something up. 

Dean pulled the plug from the bottom of the sink and wiped his hands to the towel again. With a frustrated sniff and a sharp turn he marched out of the kitchen, leaving Sam with his normal life and judgemental aura behind once more.

 

* * *

He went to Castiel but couldn't stay with him for long without wanting to punch him in the face, and since that didn't seem like the most reasonable, mature solution - especially since the older was unconscious still - he moved out fairly soon. After checking his temperature and wallowing in self-pity for a moment, still wishing he could destroy something, he decided that he was feeling good enough to pick up Anna from Mrs. Tran's immediate vicinity.  
After dressing her up and allowing her to go say bye to Castiel, he brought her to the garage and sat her down on the front seat of the Impala.   
Sam followed them in as if sensing something unusual about. Dean couldn't know how he'd known, since the last time he'd seen him had been when he'd left the kitchen. Perhaps Linda had decided to go pick up a cup of coffee and mentioned Dean, or perhaps he was still a brand of psychic - the reason hardly mattered, as there he stood, brows raised and arms spread in a sign of disbelief.

"Where are you going?" he asked like Dean wasn't allowed to come and go as he damn well pleased. 

"Out," Dean simply said, casting a half-desperate, half-rebellious look at the younger before entering the car on the driver's side. 

"Out? Dean -" 

The older gave him the cold shoulder, turning instead to put on Anna's seatbelt.  
"Where are we going?" she asked curiously.

Dean glanced at her, freezing for a moment. Sam didn't need an answer, but he wasn't pissed off at Anna, and she needed an answer. A second later, when he'd already turned on the car and headed for the ramp, he'd conjured a smile on his features and shrugged.  
"I don't know yet," he said truthfully. 

It was snowing heavily when they joined up with the road. Dean steered them towards the town and found himself following the driving regulations, a detail that both scared and surprised him. Before turning on the radio he adjusted the volume to person-friendly levels, and when the signal hit the speakers, the voice of Axl Rose charged to his ears less aggressively than he was used to.  
  
"Baby?" 

Anna made a sound but was too distracted by the scenery outside to acknowledge being addressed in any other manner. 

"Can you promise me you won't use your powers today?"

"Mm."  
She turned and squinted at him, resembling Castiel so much that Dean's heart ached.  
"Why?" 

"Because I'm going to take you to play with some kids like Henry. They would get scared if you showed them. So don't. I promise you they'll play with you a lot more if you pretend you're just like them." 

"Why?"

"Because..."  
Dean swallowed, recalling the talk he'd had with Castiel about shaming her for her powers.  
"Because that's what the world's like, Anna. You're special. Most people - they don't know that special girls like you exist. So they get scared when you tell them. It's not your fault. They just - they're just different." 

"Okay." 

Barely daring to take his eyes off the frozen road, Dean glanced at her quickly. She seemed entirely unaffected, much more interested in the snow falling from the sky instead of the topic of conflicting world-views that they'd just had.  
With a shrug he returned to driving. Maybe it was better this way. He'd get to suffer through the topic once she'd hit double digits and start grieving over how her boyfriend would think her a freak if she ever told him what she was.   
  
The realisation nearly made him steer them to the snow-covered field.   
There would come a day when she'd have a boyfriend to worry about.

 

* * *

The playground had a few kids inside, all about the age of Anna's. She was shy at first, but soon found a common ground with the rest from their shared fascination about the snow. In the small span of fifteen minutes she was already running and playing with them like any normal girl would have, extroverted and quick to join the fun in a way Dean hadn't expected from a first-timer on the social field. She lacked fear of ostracization, although she was familiar with facing prejudice. She had no proper understanding of the true scale of rejection, as within the small circle she was used to, someone always came to her aid and helped her prove herself worthy of acceptance.  
Not on this ground. Kids were cruel - Dean knew it well. 

When they'd approached the playground, that had been his only worry. Now, whenever a new parent brought her kid in or someone walked past, he feared they were an envesseled angel instead of a normal human. He hadn't even thought of the possibility before he'd sat his ass on the frozen bench and decided to let her try. Once the thought had presented itself however, it was near impossible to remove, and his anxiety grew as he waited. As he did so, he noticed that a tall, well-dressed woman in her early thirties had moved closer and closer to him over the time he'd spent supervising the adult population more than his own kid. Now she settled right next to him, leaning her back to the fence behind them, and her implied readiness for conversation grew like an aura around her until Dean nearly wanted to escape the situation.

"The black-haired girl, she's yours, right?" she asked. 

"Yeah."  
Anna didn't have black hair - her colour was dark chocolate. That said, it _did_ look black when she was fully surrounded by snow, and Dean wasn't feeling chatty, so he let it slip.  

"She's beautiful." 

"Yeah. Look, miss, you don't want to be talking to me."  
He tried to figure out a scary reason. She was probably trying to scout out if he was single, and since this was Kansas, he went with the obvious.  
"I'm gay." 

She gave him an amused look and crossed her hands over her chest.  
"Good," she said with a small shrug, "I'm Lauren, and my best friend moved out of state to marry her long-term girlfriend a couple months ago." 

_Well, shit._  
  
"Dean."  
They shook hands in the awkward manner people do when neither feels like they should, but one still starts the movement that can't be turned down. After it fell apart they shared a silence together, one that was nearly as tense and awkward as the handshake had been. 

"It's terrible, isn't it," she started again. 

"I don't really want to talk about it," Dean grunted, shifting uncomfortably.  
She didn't need to specify what was terrible - the only terrible thing today to deserve the title was the one thing Dean wanted out of his mind.

"Too close for comfort?"

"You could say so."  
He shivered, pulling his jacket tighter around his body and hiding his bare fingers under his arms.  
"Some family was - it's just, I'm just having a crappy day today. It started bad and it's just getting worse." 

"I haven't seen you around here before," Lauren noted, mercifully effortless at changing the subject. 

"That's because we haven't been here before."  
Dean followed Anna with his eyes as she ran after a blonde girl dressed in white and pastel blue. The other girl was a little older than her but screamed just as loud.  
"Who's yours?" he asked then. 

"The boy in black and orange. Jack."

"Mine's Anna."

"She looks a lot like you."

"I've been told."  
 _She looks just as much like Cas.  
_ "You - um - married?" 

"Single," Lauren sighed, then chuckled, "It's obvious, isn't it."

Dean grimaced.  
"Yeah, well, you showed some signs."

"Like approaching the only lone dad present? Yeah, no kidding," she grinned.

"It's hard to find a guy who'd be willing to be a parent for someone else's kid. To take Jack in. They all just want in my pants and right out the door the next morning." 

"Yeah, can't imagine how that feels like."  
Awkward. Like Dean hadn't been just that guy for most of his life.

"And you?" Lauren asked.

"Consider myself a married man."  
It felt strange to say.  
"Of course, paperwork's paperwork and we don't have that luxury." 

"It's hard for the kid."

"Life's hard."

Silence.

"Yes. Yes it is."  
Lauren pushed herself off the fence and walked around Dean, sitting next to him instead with a heavy sigh. She stretched her leg in front of her and adjusted her legwarmer back over the boot she was wearing. Dean watched it and wondered how she managed with heels like that in the fresh snow.  
"How old is she?" she asked then. 

"Four."

"Quite a big girl. And fast."

"She's, uh, pretty physical." 

"Jack too. He's five - constantly in trouble."

Dean chuckled.  
"Boys, right?"

"Yeah. I love him, I just wish he'd sit down sometime and, you know, stayed still for a bit." 

"I know the feeling. It's like you can just turn your back at them for a second and something's on fire," Dean huffed. 

"Precisely," Lauren laughed, "Whatever you do to keep them away from trouble, well, they alway seem to find it. It's like some kind of a law, that there's always going to be _something_ they can get to." 

"No kidding."

Dean had never had this kind of a conversation before. It was so normal, so... smooth, natural, just letting out some steam around people who knew exactly what you were talking about. Excluding, of course, the fact that Jack probably hadn't set things on actual fire. Although - who was he to say? Maybe he had.  
"You live somewhere around here?"

"Don't think me a loser," Lauren grimaced, "but mom and dad own a place a few miles out of town, and we live with them. They're older, and I just - it felt right to go back. Jack has more company, for one, more eyes to look after him. They're both long retired so I can work full days without worrying about leaving him with strangers."

"I don't think you a loser," Dean assured her, "Can't, I'm living with my brother's family." 

"Really?" 

"Yeah. Me - Cas and Anna - and Sam, Jen, their two kids, Henry and Grace. They're pretty young, too, one and four. It's not as chaotic as you'd think, place is pretty big." 

"Well, yeah, there's land around these parts."

Dean huffed. The bunker wasn't exactly a ranch but she'd never know that.

"Younger or older brother?"

"Younger. Could fool me sometimes, though."

"It's funny. I have a younger sister, five years difference, she outsmarts me sometimes too."

"Mine's just - taller and kind of fuzzy."

Lauren laughed.  
"You make him sound like a bear." 

"More like a caveman with manners. Really. But - uh - he's smart and a good guy."

Lauren crossed her legs and leaned forwards. Jack ran to her to show something he'd found - a gold-coloured button - and then ran back to the group again. His mother seemed so relaxed here, and Dean, after making sure Anna was still safely with the pack, realised he'd lowered his guard as well.  
"So, what do you do for living?" Lauren asked him in a moment's time. 

Dean couldn't look at her after the question, instead aiming his eyes elsewhere. He didn't have a lie prepared now; he wasn't on a case, and he wasn't taking this woman home. The only answer he had was that he didn't  _have_  a job, that Anna took all his time even if he'd felt like going out there and picking up the salt again.  
"Uh - I'm a hunter, actually. I still take the occasional job here and there, but I'm more of a stay-at-home kinda dad these days."

"Full-day job, too," Lauren shrugged, "I used to stay with Jack until he was two. Then Mick left and I had to change. We moved and I got a job at the clinic." 

"Nurse?" 

Lauren grinned.  
"Doctor."

"Oh. Cool," Dean chuckled. 

"Your partner works, then?" she asked him. 

Dean realised he'd just made himself sound like the mommy in their relationship, and the thought bothered him a bit.  
"He's a soldier." 

"Huh. Not much at home, then." 

"He could be more for sure. I don't know, it's in his blood - he needs to get out there. I guess it's okay - I'm used to it."  
It wasn't okay. Dean hadn't thought about it before, but put in the layman terms, it didn't sound okay anymore. He accepted these things as parts of his lifestyle, as facts he couldn't change. Cas was an angel, he'd go out there and wreak havoc every now and then and there wasn't anything he could do about it because this was _Cas_ he was talking about. No matter how much he'd hope that he'd change, it was in his blood, in his _species_ , to do it. For a moment he hoped it wouldn't be like that for Anna, but he hadn't forgotten what Castiel had said about nephilim. He'd allowed himself to forget, to just get lost in the chitchat with this stranger, but his life wasn't normal and in fact, even though it had gotten better, it still sucked pretty hard.

"You sound like he's not the only military guy in the family," Lauren replied.

"Dad was a marine. Me and Sam both, uh, we've served, too." 

"Yet you said you're a hunter," Lauren noted, "It's funny, because often guys who've been through it, they tend to credit themselves for that and not the jobs they've worked after." 

Dean nodded.  
"I think it was a bit different for us," he said, "And I'd rather forget." 

"Sounds like you had it hard." 

"Well, you could say that."

 

* * *

Anna didn't stop talking the whole way back. She had so much to talk about - of Rose, specifically, the blonde girl she'd made friends with. Rose this, Rose that. It was clear she'd never had so much fun in her life and she was so full of life it made Dean feel happy, too.   
Even if he was a little hesitant on admitting it, he'd had a good time as well. Talking with Lauren had made him feel a lot lighter, like he'd managed to leave half his burden on that bench on the playground, and even if he'd taken her number thinking he'd never call it, knowing he had it made him feel happy. He'd somehow made a friend in three hours, one that almost knew enough about him for it to be genuine. She even knew about Cas and it didn't bother her in the slightest, and though Dean had never so much as given it a thought, his relationship had certainly made him less eager to meet new people than he'd ever been before. Explaining it didn't seem like something he wanted to do - now it was the other way around, if they'd be in contact in the future, he'd need to back out a little on the whole gay thing. From what he knew, girls tended to be a little too comfortable around guys they didn't view as sexual, and gay guys were right up that list. For the first time in his life, he really didn't want to see a good-looking, nice woman in her underwear. The thought was still appealing, of course, but Cas was enough. 

The road ended much sooner than Dean had expected. He drove them down the ramp and parked the dripping, filthy Impala as close to the cleaned entry of the sewer as possible to avoid carrying the dirty slush all over the place in her wheels, and before they got back to the living quarters, he took off Anna's equally muddy shoes and his own alike, carrying them straight to the washer with the girl bouncing around, still as chatty as ever, although her excitement made her stutter worse than she usually did.  
She was _still_ dancing when they entered the bedroom and charged right up on the bed to tell Castiel what they'd been up to. The angel opened his eyes tiredly and with a confused look on his features as he tried to figure out what had hit him, but when he listened to Anna's excited half-English half-Enochian story, his expression sharpened and turned to a smile. 

Dean sat on the chair away from the bed, still not feeling like things were good enough between them that he'd want to go near the angel, but the sight of his family together in this manner made him feel warm and good and overall better than he'd felt since Castiel had appeared in a bloody mess on their entrance hall's dusty floor. The older was weakly and clumsily caressing Anna's face and hair as she barely contained her excitement there next to him, talking and talking like she'd never let out a single word from her mouth before then, using up her whole vocabulary and mixing in words she clearly had no idea how to use, mixing pronouns and making grammar her little bitch whenever it got in the way of her story, but Dean could already see the approaching sleepiness in her as she'd spent up more than most of her energy over their adventure. She'd sleep soundly the whole night. 

"Anna," he finally called when she'd started sounding like she was all out of things to say but was still too excited to stop talking, "Let's take a bath." 

"No!" 

Dean rolled his eyes.  
"Yes," he replied calmly, "You're probably hungry, too. You know the rules." 

"Mm-mm-mm. No." 

"Yes," Castiel said to her before Dean could argue again, "Anna, listen to your father." 

Dean raised a brow at them both.

"But -"   
Anna looked conflicted.

"You can tell me more when you've changed and had some food in you."  
The angel's voice was still weak and rough, and he could barely lift his hand to hold Anna's. Suddenly, Dean didn't feel angry anymore, and with his anger faded the need to stay within an arm's reach. He stood up and went to the bed, leaning in to take Anna in his arms.

"Cas... If we take the bath and eat, are you going to be awake for me?" he asked quietly.

Castiel looked at him, already having difficulty keeping his eyes open.  
"You can... wake me up again," he said in an apologetic voice, and his expression was hurt like he'd already imagined what Dean would have to say to him. 

One arm holding Anna still, Dean brought a hand through the angel's hair and smiled at him.  
"I'll wake you up, then."  
He straightened up and returned the hand under Anna's body to support her growing weight. She wrapped her arms around his neck and yawned.  
  
"Cas, I... I, uh, I'm happy you're here."  
It wasn't what he was trying to say, but saying was still so hard it often took more than five tries - and still failed.  
"I..." 

"I know, Dean," the angel chuckled weakly, "I know. Thank you."  
  
 _I love you. I'm sorry. I forgive you._  

_I know._


	11. Sandcastles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”  
>  _\- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned_

* * *

 

Forgiveness didn't mean that they didn't need to talk. As tired as Anna was, the clock was barely seven and there was nowhere else for Dean to have his talk with Castiel, so Sam promised to make them a forty minute opening during which they'd need to more or less get their talk over and done with before Dean would take Anna and put her to bed.  
  
When Dean settled on the bed next to his angel and planted a lingering kiss on his mouth to wake him up, he felt anxious and depressed already and wholly unwilling to share any words at all. More than anything, he just wanted to curl up next to the other and drown himself in everything that was alive in him, the sound of his breathing and the heartbeat inside his chest and the warmth of his body and the scent that was so strong about him now that he'd stayed in the bed for so long.  
  
Light had found its way back behind the blue in Castiel's eyes, and he smiled at Dean when he registered his face in front of him.  
"Dean..." he muttered, reaching a trembling hand to join with Dean's.

Dean held it tight for a second, drawing in air in a futile attempt to become more well-prepared.  
  
Before he could talk, Castiel started.  
"I know what you're here to talk about, but - I need you to promise me you don't bring her out again."

"What?"  
The word fell out from Dean's mouth like a heavy, slippery stone.  
"She did just fine, Cas - she knows not to use her powers, and -"

"It's not about that," Castiel replied, his voice dry and cracking, "It's for her safety."

"You know who had a funny idea like that about the safety of his kids? My Dad, Cas. And it didn't _protect_ us."

Castiel let out a strained breath. He struggled to get up, and Dean helped him adjust on the pillow so that they were on a more even level, eye to eye, equal.  
"That's - not what I mean. I'm... not saying don't bring her out ever again. The Aldaraia - they will be interested in me. Too interested in me, Dean, after they'll find out - and they will - that I kept secrets from them."  
He closed his eyes and chuckled.  
"Again."

"Why the hell would Team Annihilation be interested in you? They wanna date you or what? Cas, tell me you didn't slip a fucking thing. Tell me you didn't."

Castiel shook his head as much as he could in the pose he was in.  
"No one knows of Anna. I'd die rather than tell."  
  
Dean noticed a drop of blood gathering by the rim of his left nostril. Instinctively he reached for a napkin on the bedside table and patted it off, causing the angel to frown and look utterly confused for a second. When he showed him the bloodied paper, Castiel sighed.

"Are you going to die, Cas? Seriously."

"No," Castiel assured him, "I'm not. Not yet. As I said, you're giving me strength."

"That sounds nice and all, but how the hell exactly am I doing that?" Dean asked, the frustration in his voice born solely out of worry.

"I was wounded after I sent you back in time to look for the ashes of a phoenix once," Castiel replied patiently, eyes closed and breathing heavily, "And I had to reach inside Bobby's soul to draw enough strength in order to bring you back."

"Yeah, I remember. It was pretty awkward. What's that have to do with this?"

"It's - the same thing, except that I'm injured worse and the energy drain isn't as immediate. I wouldn't draw energy from you directly even if I had the strength to do so, but on the other hand, you seem to have made the decision to lend it to me regardless. It merely happens slower, on your terms rather than mine, through the connection that we share."

"Sounds crazy, Cas."

"It's not what we should be talking about." A hint of a smile lingered upon the angel's paler-than-usual lips. "But I'm thankful. I'd be dead without your help."

Dean grimaced.  
"You know, it's weird to be thanked for something you never made a conscious decision about. I mean, of course I want to help you, I just - I wish I'd known I could, and I wish I could put in a bit more effort."

Castiel chuckled again.  
"You are putting in as much effort as you can, Dean. You need to remember that I'm a being of pure energy - replacing what I've lost will take its time, even now that I can regenerate on my own."

"Angels are freaking weird, Cas. But we were talking about Anna. You said - is she in danger?"

"I don't know."  
Castiel sighed and struggled to sit up. With Dean's help he could, and soon they were both settled to sit with their backs leaning to the bed's end.  
"That's why you need to keep her inside. I'm glad... I'm glad you took her out, even if it meant risking her, but now that you know... we can't take the risk again."

"Why would they be looking into you?"

"Because," Castiel said with a bitter expression, "I sought out a known protector of a nephil thought to be highly dangerous, and I did not do it to kill them. I left a witness."

"Nobody survived, Cas."

The angel's eyes widened in surprise, then in grief. His breathing wavered as his expression returned to normal, although he looked even more distraught than he had a moment ago.  
"It... means very little. She was alive when I left. The angels would be in the first responders, and they would know. Even if she wasn't conscious anymore - they would simply have to read her mind, and they would see it all. I... I screwed up, Dean. I only wanted answers - I..."

"Needed someone to talk to?" Dean muttered as bitter as Castiel's expression had been a moment ago, suddenly understanding fully why the older had done what he had.

"Yes."

"Cas... no offense but I think I'm proofing this place up."

"I would expect no less. I'm sorry, Dean."

"Yeah. But not tonight. Not fully, anyway. Tell me what I can do and I'll do that, and the rest - we'll look into it tomorrow with everyone."

Castiel smiled and nodded.  
"Good plan."

 

* * *

 

Next day, the situation was explained to everyone, and Sam, Kevin and Jen helped to make sure there was a no-angel zone guaranteed for the majority of the bunker. None of the sigils had any effect on Anna, and she happily jogged past them every now and then in between her secret dippings in the paint buckets. The bedroom was left with the least defenses, effectively grounding Castiel inside with no powers to use and only limited ability to heal as well - he'd assured Dean it would be alright, as long as he kept visiting him at least once a month.  
Dean promised he would, but not before he'd forced a long and intense eye contact with the older to try and figure out if he was joking or not. Only after he'd played along the older flashed a smile and winked, causing the man to roll his eyes at him and lock him inside the mainly-proofed room like a disobedient puppy.

The corridor was full of sigils (and Anna's and Henry's handprints, because there simply seemed to be no way to keep them out); sigils that prevented entry, sigils that prevented escape, sigils that prevented use of angelic powers, sigils that weakened angels, sigils that turned off the angel radio, sigils that with a touch could momentarily disable an angel's control over their vessel and leave behind a probably confused vessel on their own. Anything that could possibly make an angel's life difficult could now be found in each and every room of the bunker's; they took no chances, and even the bathrooms were angel-free zones before dusk. The sigils preventing entry were not made with the same paint as the rest of them - they were put in with the intention to remove them when Castiel would be strong enough to get back on his feet, but the rest would remain.  
Dean couldn't shake the discomfort he felt at the thought of what they were doing to the other, still remembering how weakened and sickly he'd been when he'd last entered a protected zone, but he couldn't see an alternative, so as long as Castiel would live up to his words and survive - _function_ \- then it just would have to do.

Inside their bedroom, only sigils that prevented angelic communication and escape by flight could be found. To make up for this huge lack of security, Anna would spend the majority of her time outside the room, and during the night she would sleep between her parents, both of whom rested notoriously uneasy - not to mention the fact that both of them slept with their weapons.  
If she knew all of this was to protect her, she showed no sign of it to any of them. The only thing she was curious about was how these sigils were preventing angels from entering, and she'd only wondered if Castiel should be thrown out as well, since he was an angel and angels were currently out of fashion. Dean had given her a long stare before asking her if she thought it'd be a good idea to throw Cas out, and only at that stage it seemed to dawn to her what it meant: she'd promptly shaken her head so hard that her hair had lost any resemblance of order in the span of seconds.

"You alright?" Dean asked as he closed the door to the bedroom behind him.

Castiel was sitting on the bed looking sickly and pale, but at least he was sitting. Slowly the older nodded.  
"I've been better, but I've been much worse very recently, too," he spoke with a smile.

"And the sigils?"

"Are definitely making me uncomfortable."

"Good, I guess," Dean grimaced, sitting on the bed next to his angel.  
With uncharacteristic gentleness he took the other's head between his hands and kissed him, tasting the sleep on his lips and realising it had been a while since he'd felt even the hint of that on Castiel.  
"Want me to bring you a cup of coffee?" he asked when their lips parted, but his hands still held the male's head.  
His fingers slid into the soft and clean hair of his and traced the curve of the ear as they returned to the other's temples. The corner of Castiel's mouth twitched, visiting a half-smirk before dropping back to the quiet smile he'd worn since the beginning of the conversation.

"I'd like you to sit with me for a moment," he said, "but then - or if you'd rather sit with me with coffee, then I suppose that is an option as well."

Dean huffed warmly, finally letting his hands down.  
"I'm actually really fond of the idea of drinking coffee with you. Hold up."

His visit to the kitchen was brief, as someone else had clearly had a similar desire and filled the pot with fresh and strong coffee. He filled two cups and returned to the bedroom with them, placing one in Castiel's expecting hands and the other on the table until he'd properly adjusted himself on the bed.

"So," he started, picking up the cup again and sipping before continuing, "the plan. We need one."

"Plan for what specifically?" Castiel asked, tilting his head.  
His lips were wet and Dean couldn't help but feel drawn to the sight. He felt his jaw clenching for a brief moment before relaxing again, and during that moment he'd forced his eyes down towards his coffee instead. His cheeks felt hot.

"For God squad. How we get rid of Team Annihilation. How we keep Anna safe."

Castiel nodded with a thoughtful sound.  
"I have one. It's not complete, and I have no idea how we are supposed to cover up the fact she looks exactly like us, but I think I can train her to hide her aura. It's a start."

"Yeah?" Dean raised his head again, having forgotten all about what he'd like to do to Castiel's mouth like the thoughts had never even crossed his mind.

Castiel nodded again.  
"I told you already that when I... met the adult nephil, I couldn't tell her apart - I had no idea she was special. Nothing about her gave that out."

"But she could tell you apart, right?" Dean remembered suddenly.

"Yes."  
Castiel's expression brightened.  
"Yes. We could -"

"Teach Anna to point angels out to us. Yeah. She can see the halos, right?"

"Perhaps more. But the halos are enough, they're... vivid and bright. If she can hide herself, then we will have an edge - even if I'm not with you."

Dean nodded.  
"Even if neither of us is with her, if we tell her."

They shared a moment of tense silence.

"She needs to know, doesn't she," Castiel sighed finally.

Dean grimaced.  
"I - I think so. I don't know, Cas, how do you tell a small girl the angels want her dead because - because she's an abomination? Man... religion's going to be so weird for her. That we build churches in honour of a bunch of dicks that want her dead and won't take no for an answer."  
He'd reached his hand across the space between himself and Castiel, and now Castiel's grip around his palm tightened a little. He didn't look at Dean and Dean felt like he couldn't - that his conscience wasn't clear enough.  
"You know," Dean continued after a moment, "if someone talked like that about humans in my presence, I'd flat-out punch them."

Castiel smiled faintly.  
"I learned that about you quite early."  
He cast a look at Dean, examined him and then sighed.  
"You're right about angels, I can't argue with you. I also can't punch you for being correct."

"Cas..."

"Yes?"

"There's a saying for this. I can't remember it. Something about a rotten apple not spoiling the whole barrel."  
  
He was surprised to receive the hug that he got. Castiel wasn't one for hugging - especially not when he was injured and holding a cup of coffee. Yet, undeniably, he was now hugging Dean, and Dean returned the gesture awkwardly.

"There are many rotten apples in this barrel, and they keep killing the ones that are still good."

Dean felt uncomfortable at the realisation that Castiel didn't seem to list himself amongst the latter.

 

* * *

 

January rolled towards its end and suddenly, on a morning that should have been like any other, Dean woke up twice the age he felt he'd stopped counting the years at. Twitching unwillingly to check the time, he found the numbers much beyond those he'd expected to see, even way past when he'd been supposed to wake up - the bright light had not alerted him gently to a new day, and he'd overslept the alarm by two hours. All of this was very suspicious, given that his daily routines had more or less stayed the same for years and there was nothing but deliberate tampering that could possibly put him off them all of a sudden like this.  
Stiffly, he rose from the equally suspiciously empty bed, stretched and looked around for his old clothes that had mysteriously disappeared from the chair next to the bed; after stroking through his hair a couple times in a frustrated state of confusion, Dean finally wandered off to the drawer to get a new set.

All of this done, he should have been ready for at least a shower, but the disruption of his routine was making him unwilling to function. Instead, he sat back down for a moment, drank the half-emptied glass of water from the bedside table and tried to figure out if there could be a way for something to have landed him in an alternative universe where he was the sole occupant of the whole wide world, as not even a sound carried to his ears from the outside. It wasn't anything unusual on its own, but the fact that his broken-winged angel was gone from his side was a somewhat alarming sign to pile up with the fact that both his alarms had turned themselves off during the night.  
  
A satisfied grunt escaped Dean as he finally picked himself up again and wandered sluggishly towards the door. It had taken a lot to make him feel so safe and comfortable in his environment that he did not truly fear any foul play when strange things happened. This didn't tingle his sense for supernatural catastrophes at all. This tingled his sense for non-malicious skullduggery most likely orchestrated by his younger brother and Castiel together.  
Everything about the morning thus far reeked heavily of them both.

The sigils in the corridor were intact still, making the place look like it was inhabited by not only one psychotic serial killer but by a whole cult of them. Dean made his way into the shower and stayed inside for a good while, taking his time washing the sleep off his body until he felt at least half-awake. When he was drying himself off to a fresh-smelling towel hanging by his hook, he heard Sam passing by and shouting something indecipherable back to the study before the door closed.

Before Dean got out, the younger had closed the door to his own bedroom, and though Dean cast a look in that direction, he chose the opposite instead.  
  
"Morning?" he threw in as he entered the study, unwrapping his towel from around his head and throwing it across his shoulder instead.

Castiel was sitting at the table and raised his head to view Dean; in a moment, he was up and met Dean in the middle, smiling.  
"Happy birthday," he wished quietly and brought the younger in for a kiss.  
  
Dean smirked into it awkwardly.  
"Thanks."

"It still amazes me sometimes, if you don't feel insulted," Castiel spoke fondly, "that you've existed for no longer than a fraction of the while I have, yet somehow, you're still wiser than I am."

"Uh, thanks? Are you trying to make me better about turning 40, or are you just being genuine in the usual awkward way?"

The angel chuckled, gripped his shirt and pulled him to the table. They occupied the usual seats facing the study, as instinctively paranoid as ever.  
  
"I'm being genuine," he said then, "although if you feel bad about your age and this helps you see it in a different light then, I suppose, you can take it that way if you'd like to."

Dean leaned his elbow on the table and turned to look at the other. He was the strangest being he'd ever met - millions of years packed into human flesh alongside the power of an atom bomb, and all of it sometimes trickled through the cracks, more often than not in the harmless way that made Castiel so relatable even if it was in the weirdest of ways. The angel in his incapability to fit in no matter how hard he tried seemed to have some fundamental similarity to something Dean felt in himself as well, something that he sometimes found in others and which made it easier for him to relate and grow fond of them as well. It was something that made it very clear that he was not human, yet in the process made him more so than some people Dean had met. He was a walking, talking, winged paradox with a halo.

"Cas," the younger huffed, "You're really weird."

"Thank you."

"Am I going to need to make my own coffee?"

"No. It should arrive in a bit." Castiel's smile turned playful and a little excited.  
"We thought," he continued after a moment's expecting silence, "That today you wouldn't have to do much of anything at all."

"I appreciate the effort," Dean huffed amusedly.

He reached a hand to push into the older's hair and played around with it until it stood up to every direction as if he'd just gotten up. His own hair was settling down, unruffled and smooth after the shower, and unlike usually, he didn't feel like taking the time to style it.  
Perhaps the man he'd become no longer saw the reason to.

 

* * *

 

Spring came. As obvious and set to stone as the fact was, it still surprised Dean to realise it was happening. For most the winter he'd stayed holed up in the bunker, buried from head to toe in notes and trying to explain to Anna why they couldn't go outside. She didn't understand danger, but she certainly understood boredom.

A couple times Dean considered calling Lauren, asking her if they could come visit her, but he always decided against it. By bringing her to the middle of _this_ , no matter how innocently, was risking her life and the life of Jack as well. Grace was offering some solace to Anna, and Jennifer allowed her to take part in caring for her, and Henry - although at five he was starting to find Anna a bit too girly for his company and more often choosing the luxury of rather associating with friends he'd met outside the bunker - was actively engaging her in games of exploration and war.  
More often than not, when Dean took time off from writing and summing up to use the bathroom or fill up his coffee mug for the umpteenth time, he would end up in a traffic of noisy gunfire from both sides as Henry and Anna pretended to be the heroes and villains of whichever terrible almost-safe-for-kids movie they'd seen most recently.

The most memorable moment was when Dean went to pull out some carrots from their not so exotic botany garden and found Anna from between the cabbages and rhubarb that Linda Tran had lovingly grown for her own entertainment and for the use of the bunker's population, and been told that she was in fact not his daughter, but rather a dinosaur hidden and waiting for her prey.  
She was wearing a white skirt that no longer seemed all too white by the time she'd stopped being an extinct species. Sam gladly accepted the blame for all of this, although he refused to admit he'd known the kids were spying on him and Jennifer when they'd watched the Jurassic Park with red wine and what sounded like the most Sam-like game of drunken trivia Dean had ever been let in on.

Castiel was slowly recovering, but the weight on the sentence lingered heavily upon the word "slowly". He'd grown frustrated early on with his near unnoticeable progress in the matter and day by day had gotten more concerned of how his absence would look in the eyes of the Aldaraia. Aldaraia was the self-appointed _Will of God_ that Dean rather viewed as an angelic nazi program set out to purify their own race from unwanted half-bloods and of any and all human influence instead of protecting the creation, which they'd so fondly referred to as their cause when Castiel had first found out about it.

"Why is it that all your knitting groups are batshit, Cas?" he'd asked one evening when Anna had fallen asleep between them and both of them found themselves equally uneasy to follow suit.

"They're collectives of angels. It should speak for itself," the angel had replied with a tone of regret and self-hatred.

Dean would have wanted to make love to him for that comment, but having Anna not only in the room with them but _between_ them in the most literal sense made that a little difficult, so he had to do with some form of child-friendly comfort instead.  
It was around that time that they started entertaining the idea of giving the girl her own fully-proofed room in which she'd be safe at all times. She was no longer a baby; she was a young girl, a child that was as quickly growing in independence as she was in size, strength and wit. There was no lack of space in the base, either - after getting everything in order in the bunker, they had twenty habitable rooms, and even if each and every last one of them had taken one for themselves, Anna would still have been left with eleven to choose from.

The idea was received with mild terror and overflowing excitement from the girl herself. Henry, the closest thing she had to an older brother and her only model of an older child, had his own room, as adjacent as it was to that of Sam and Jennifer's. Having one for herself - especially one that did not share a door with that of Dean and Castiel's - would mean that she'd reached a state of maturity and would, in essence, become equal with the tough guy.  
The matter was sealed, and subsequently so was the room opposite of that of her parents by the means of a hundred sigils, all painted in the strangest of colours to pass for decoration on her ceiling, walls and floor. The unused rooms had up to that point been simply locked: there was no need to protect them further than by the no-entry sigils that were painted upon each and every damn door in the bunker, excluding the rooms in which Castiel sometimes made an appearance in. If no angel could enter them and nobody lived inside to begin with, the rest would have been pointless to make.

When the room was made about as safe as a supernatural bank vault, Jennifer and Dean took Anna out to choose her own furniture. With the still lingering debt Jen had landed them in by having a difficult pregnancy, none of it was very expensive - the curse of living with an actual identity - but all of it was much more so than anything Dean had ever owned himself, and when everything was painstakingly loaded up in the van they'd chosen for the trip, brought back to the bunker and assembled, Anna's room looked so much like any other girl's that Dean had to make a brief stop at the whiskey cabinet to deal with the fact.

The running joke of the bunker for the next month was whether or not they should paint some pretty flowers and birds amongst the rest of the sigils too and eventually Jennifer did - but only in the kitchen.

Castiel's flight feathers grew back in around the time the last of frost had disappeared from the early mornings when Jennifer left for work and Dean often took Anna out for a walk. The angel started joining up with them for the sheer pleasure of staying out of the bunker, which now was making him feel miserable and in which he'd been locked like a bird of paradise for the best part of the past six months. He claimed it was for the girl's safety, but Dean knew better; he could see it in the manner the angel's presence changed when he got out, the sense of power that he'd regained with the potential that returned within him. He could breathe freely and Dean didn't blame him from taking pleasure in that.

To that point, all Anna's training had taken place in the bedroom. Dean was most often present, sometimes just because he hadn't taken his head out of the notebooks they'd piled up over the years but mostly because he felt that he needed to stay as up to date on her progress as possible. On top of the frustration she felt at being suddenly isolated again from the world she'd barely entered, the fact that her training had made a full turn from proactive to defensive wasn't making her mood any better. As a direct result of this, she wasn't making much progress either, no matter how often they repeated to her that her freedom was absolutely dependent on her success in this. Granted, she'd at least grown aware of her aura and could alter it slightly at will. This did not make her invisible - in fact, Castiel said it made her glow still a little brighter, and that was about as counterproductive as results could possibly get from what they were aiming for. Yet they both remained positive: if she could increase her presence, she would certainly in time learn to mask it or reduce it as well. It simply required more patience and skill than she had, and no matter how many treats dangled at the end of the line, she couldn't reach up to them and grew impatient and depressed instead when she didn't have what it took to succeed.

All this time, Dean tried to remind himself and Castiel alike that she was only a child, and not a very mature one at that. They were expecting her to not only learn, but to be able to properly perform something they'd only known a full-grown adult to be able to achieve. It was entirely plausible to think that she wasn't developmentally at a point where such an achievement was even within the realm of potential for her and that pushing her about it would only make her feel like she'd failed, when in truth the task they expected her to succeed in was all but impossible.

It was hard, especially when achieving the seemingly impossible had been the sole requisite of survival for both her parents for the past decades. In Dean's case, sometimes he felt it had been his whole life. That wasn't the kind of a life he wished Anna to have; it wasn't the kind of a life he as a father wanted to provide for his child. 

Slowly as summer grew closer, they backpedaled into a balance of using and containing Anna's powers. It made her less irritated and moody and returned motivation into her training, improving results on both fields.  
  
Then came the time when Castiel was fully healed and simply could not pretend to be missing in action any longer. After a heavy but rather brief conversation with Dean, he went back to Heaven, leaving the younger alone and scared in their shared bed, fearing for a good reason that it had been the very last he'd see of the angel.

 

* * *

 

June was unexpectedly hot. Even the inside of the bunker, hidden deep below a layer of cool earth, felt more like an oven as the days turned into weeks and June towards its end. Sam and Dean found themselves spending unpreceded amounts of time soaking up in the lake just to get rid of the heat, all the while teaching Anna and Henry to swim with mediocre success. Whenever Jen joined up with them she took Grace along, and together the three of the children built sandcastles with moats, the latter of which could have as well been there just for Grace's sake. After first getting angry about the fact that his younger sibling kept tripping and falling into the castles, Henry finally declared Grace the fearsome Gracezilla, and that the only thing they could possibly do was to build better castles, deeper moats and try and defend them against her constant attacks. This led to a lot of splashing in the muddy waters and some spans of ear-breaking screaming, but none of this could take Dean's thoughts away from Castiel. No amount of heat, water and noise could make him worry less, and Sam knew it, although neither of them spoke of the angel's absence.

He'd been gone for a month, but at least he'd had the courtesy to call every now and then to make it less likely for Dean to drown himself in the bottle, although he did that regardless at times when fear got the best of him. His message was always the same: it was too dangerous for him to return, that he was being watched, that he was most definitely on the list of angels thought to harbor connections or knowledge about the nephilim, and that while they did not know of Dean's involvement, they would soon enough if they wouldn't be careful. 

At the same time, whenever he wasn't outdoors pretending to be the father of the year, Dean was finishing with the notebooks. The further back he looked, the less information relevant to his needs - anyone's pressing needs, in fact - he could find, but the clearer his memory of the phases became. None of it was pleasant. Not the memory of the manner they'd revived Anna's vessel (or being reminded that it had once been a _vessel_ in the first place), not that of carving the dead child out of the womb of the stiff, reeking corpse, but most surprisingly, the memory of himself was the one he wanted to recall the least. It wasn't passion that had driven him into the nightmare, it was pure unadultered madness. The more he looked back at himself, the less he understood why Castiel hadn't locked him up and declared him out of his mind and dangerous to those near him.  
It wasn't even biology. It was desperation and insanity.  
And now, somehow, it seemed to be gone. From experience Dean knew that things like these, they didn't end well. Had Bobby still lived, the moment he would have heard he'd come right to him and beaten some sense into him - in a Bobby-like manner, which usually didn't involve actual physical violence. But Bobby didn't live, and that was the bane of the rest of the good luck Dean had ever had, although he had to admit it was strange that the man hadn't risen from the dead just to bring that ounce of sense back into his boy. 

Yet when he sat beside Anna's bed reading to her the (at their pace) unending adventures of Frodo and Sam - the two cursed hobbits - and their ilk, he didn't see the curse looming above them. He couldn't see anything wrong with the picture. His girl was perfect and sweet - impatient and prone to fits of anger, but quick to forgive and forget and ever so willing to fit in. She was the opposite of the picture of a nephil that Dean had learned from the lore, although she did still prefer chaos in all its imaginable forms as opposed to order, which Dean couldn't find very alarming due to the very fact that every kid he'd ever known had been like that. Every kid allowed a childhood, anyway; he recalled none of it for himself, aside the long strides in the middle of the night when he'd still longed for a sense of freedom and a different kind of life for himself. When that had been taken from him, so had the seeds of chaos withered. He was orderly because he had to be. When he wasn't, the whole world went down the toilet, and sadly that seemed to not be an exaggeration as life so far had taught him.

Where was the pain and death he'd been promised? Where was the uncontrollable storm that had blown to bloody shreds a hundred people just less than a year ago? Where was the fear he'd felt the first months, where was the fever that forced him to go on? Where was the wildfire, the ruin, the end of all things that the child had been near prophecied to bring? He saw none of it. He just saw his little girl, his angel in her eyes and his own insecurities behind her mask of courage.  
  
And all that time, Castiel was out there somewhere, trying to find a hole through which they could make her disappear, allow her some space to breathe, a world to explore. And what the hell could he possibly do to achieve it? How could he turn the heads of a horde that saw no shades of grey? Dean's head ached when he settled to sleep, listening to the newest message in his phone telling him things he didn't want to hear, of days that would yet come that he'd need to stand strong as a man who'd lost half of who he was. And at the end of it came a single unexpected line, a promise;  
"Dean," Castiel's voice added timidly when seconds had passed from the moment he'd last spoken, the time granted to the message stretching to a close and filling with the sound of cars passing wherever the older had landed for the call, " _Olani hoath ol._ " 

In Enochian, every word is a spell.

 

* * *

 

The turn of July passed Dean unnoticed. The next time he checked the date it was already the 4th, and he wouldn't have unless Henry hadn't been running around declaring the date. Anna followed Sam and Jen the whole day, occasionally trying to convince Dean to join the fun, but Dean didn't feel festive and after three in the afternoon declared he was off to take a nap so that maybe his spirits would rise from the dead by the power of some quality private time. That told Sam enough to make sure no living soul approached his room for the better part of the hour he spent under a blanket in pitch black darkness giving himself a throughout treatment that did not take away the hollowness and the ache but certainly made him feel a little less tense.  
His lips called the name of Castiel's a couple times more than he'd intended - when his fingers entered him, for example, it just fell out of him like dew from the petals of some wild flower. And when his back arched, hips pushing to thin air, he gasped for it like air, release flowing into him and bringing the name out in multiple hitched breaths, cut and broken to pieces: A repeating and turning into a lengthy H instead of a proper S, and as he trembled afterwards, he kept whispering it into the darkness, other words binding it amongst them in a silent prayer to bring the angel back to Dean.

The reward of it was a gentle, sudden touch upon the back of his hand, causing him to jump up and back to the wall, the still tingling, freshly touched hand slipping silent and fast under the pillow to grab the angel blade hidden underneath.  
"I'd advice against spousal murder, Dean, you might regret it once I was dead," Castiel spoke in the dark and Dean could hear the amusement and the smirk on him. 

"Goddamnit, Cas," he breathed out, shock fading with tension from his body and he laughed, letting go of the blade and reaching for the male instead in the direction he'd heard his voice from, "Come here. You're a freaking creep, did you know it? Just - how long did you stand there? Goddamnit." 

Castiel laughed. His knees pressed into the mattress, fingers eagerly gripping Dean's hand in turn as the younger's wound around the wrist of the older's hand, and allowed the man to pull him close and into a kiss.  
Dean's free hand slipped right onto the back of his neck to keep him there, keep him still, and their lips were equally eager to claim the other's. The angel climbed onto the younger's hips and leaned down upon them, the rough fabric of his pants a strange sensation against Dean's sensitive skin. 

"Long enough," Castiel mumbled in a breathless response as Dean turned to nip at his neck instead, already pushing hands under his coat and jacket and then hurrying to remove his tie. 

"Perv," the younger muttered against the skin stretched over his collarbones.  
The sensation made him moan and shiver. 

"I find it hard to believe that you'd," Castiel started and was briefly cut off by a moan that forced itself past and into his sentence, "have what it takes for a second round after - ah - after what I saw you do."

"Shut up," Dean grunted, heavily blushing in the dark.  
He didn't even want to turn on the light; it was good enough to feel, smell and hear the angel there with him and know that he was clearly staying for a longer while if he had the time to make love before spilling the news.

 

* * *

 

"Do I even _want_ to know?" Sam asked with a disbelieving chuckle as the two of them emerged from the living quarters into the study where a meal was being served.

"Definitely not," Dean grinned with a wink, barely evading the cannonball that Anna had become as she charged off the table and jumped into Castiel's arms.

The angel lifted her and exchanged some quick words with her in Enochian that Dean didn't even try to eavesdrop on: he'd just spotted a plate with bacon piled upon it in the middle of the table in front of Jennifer, who rolled her eyes so dramatically it spoke volumes about how much she had not wanted the images she'd just been subjected to. A part of Dean wanted to remind her that more than once, she'd been having loud sex on the media room's couch with Sam when Dean had  _nearly_ been stupid enough to enter without knocking and therefore was no one to look in pain about the matter, but for the sake of the children, he kept quiet and instead flashed a challenging grin at her. 

"Good to see you alive," Sam greeted Castiel when they were finally all sitting down.

Dean stared intently at Kevin, who was making very slow progress choosing which strips of bacon he wanted: the prophet never once lifted his eyes from Dean, and he had the most annoying smirk on his face that told Dean just about enough of why he was taking so much time.   
Castiel smiled a little sadly as he reached in to pour himself a cup of coffee from the desserts section: after all, he didn't need food. He often ate with them, but only once everyone else had already had their fill, and Dean supposed this would be one of those times. Castiel loved food, but he loved it like he loved sex: only when it was convenient and served some purpose. Sex always served a purpose when it was between them as it brought them closer, eased tension and, of course, _Dean_ needed it, but with food, the "purpose" could be as simple as making use of the scraps that would otherwise end up in the trash. In short, Castiel was their dog at the dinner table. The only downside was that he did not lick the floor when the kids made a mess and sometimes he stared at them eating just like a dog would - Dean in particular - until the younger would share some with him.

"Barely," the angel spoke, and it took a Dean moment to catch up on what he was replying to.  
He'd finally gotten to the bacon and was currently in the process of filling the energy void developing inside him as a result of the used-up calories from their work-out session, but the tone of Castiel's voice caught his attention regardless of the bounty laid in front of him. 

"Well, that sounds pretty ominous," he commented when Castiel seemed to not intend to continue.

The angel lowered his head and smiled a little.  
"I'll explain later," he said and glanced at Dean with that funny shy way he often did when he seemed to have fallen in love with the younger all over again.   
It happened often enough to make Dean feel confident that their relationship wouldn't run into any major issues due to fading of their feelings for one another. 

"Anna," Dean grunted, spotting the girl pushing vegetables to the side of her plate at the edge of his vision, "Eat your greens."

 

* * *

 

Sam laid out three bottles in the middle of the media room's low table, setting down glasses for himself, Jennifer, Dean, Castiel and Kevin all. The kids were all asleep, worn after watching the fireworks, and Dean was already tipsy enough to have abandoned caution entirely - he'd curled up under Castiel's arm and laid his head on his chest the moment they'd gotten on the couch, taking up the whole corner. Kevin had the padded stool that he often occupied while gaming and that everyone but Henry considered to be his property.  
  
Once properly settled and all with their drinks served, they took a photo to commemorate the occasion: they had a few of these already from Christmas, Thanksgiving and now one 4th of July too, sometimes with other people but often enough with just the five of them and usually with the kids in, too. Other than the kids, the pictures hardly changed at all - none of them looked much different from year to year, and in the low light cast by candles now, no one would be able to tell apart the wrinkles that may have gotten longer or deeper over the year's time.  
The tradition had originally started from the photo they'd taken on their Last Day On Earth, but unlike that photo, these were not burned the day after. It was a sign of better days: none of them had died since the beginning of the series, and the thought of that made Dean feel strange. He'd been to no funerals for over six years now.

The realisation caused him to grip the angel's soft grey t-shirt tighter, as suddenly the older's words from earlier echoed in his mind. Castiel was the one of them in most danger of dying. Not only that, he was a likely candidate for being the centrepiece of their next funeral.  
"Cas?" he breathed to the older's ear as the rest of them were chatting loudly. 

"Mm?" 

"Don't ever leave me."

The angel's fingers sought out Dean's ear and brushed along the freshly trimmed, short hair over his temples. He watched the fire of the candles shiver in the moving air and thought with a shade of sadness in his eyes, caressing the younger by his side over and over again along the same tracks as gently as he'd started.  
"I can't promise that," he finally said, "but I will do my best to make it so." 

"That's not good enough."  
Dean closed his eyes and tried to swallow the fear that crawled into the tips of his fingers from the pit of his stomach.  
"I can't live without you." 

"As much as I can hope I had the choice in my own hands, Dean..." 

"I love you. _Olani hoath ol, Castiel._ Don't you dare die, don't you dare leave me here alone." 

The angel lowered his gaze into the glass of whiskey he held and was turning around in his fingers, smiling. His smile widened until it warmed his eyes and made his face look more human with all the wrinkles, creases and imperfections highlighted by the beautiful expression that returned blood into Dean's extremities like a gulp of strong alcohol would. It made him dizzy like the whiskey, too.  
Castiel glanced at him timidly, still smiling and now blushing as well; his shyness made him twice as dear to Dean, and the way he drank to regain courage was just about crossing a line. 

"I'm not going anywhere," he said quietly in turn, "And I have no intention to. Not before it's your time to leave - and I will follow you back home when that time comes, just as I've followed you to all realms before that." 

Dean felt choked and emptied two glasses in row to get rid of the tension inside: first his own, then the angel's. 


	12. Growth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well 9x18 was just painful wasn't it

* * *

 

 

The moment they got back in their room, they made love again. It was the kind that started out passionate, aiming to be quick, then ended up moving to a second and a third round that each took more and more time, starting from small touching that was meant to be romantic - not erotic - but which just never stopped until they were breathless and aroused again, just needing to be a little bit closer still.  
After the third orgasm Dean couldn't stop his body from trembling; his breathing was fast and often cut by either his shivers or a chuckle. He pushed his face into the wet chest of the angel's and sought contact to his skin from all parts, enjoying the feel of the older's arms around him. Castiel was as exhausted as he was, brought so in touch with his vessel that he felt himself in it as a part of it. As was common for him at this stage, he didn't want to recreate the distance - the difference between his grace and his vessel - before Dean had fallen asleep, taking the best of both the contact itself as well as the slow caring gentleness that followed.

"Dude," Dean moaned breathlessly onto the older's neck, "five. Five freaking times today."

Castiel let out a low laughter. His fingers rubbed the younger's head and charged down his neck onto his back, beginning to massage him absently as he rested there beside him.  
"You've proven me wrong."

"About?"

"Your ability to perform."

"Man," Dean grunted, "that word alone makes my cock hurt."  
After just breathing for a moment, arm loosely hanging over the older's side, Dean chuckled again.  
"I'm 40 years old, man, and... and you still get me going like this."

"It sounds like I should be proud."

"Well, you should."  
Breathing.  
"Cas... will you ever actually... report in?"

Castiel reached for the blanket they'd kicked aside and brought it over them both. Then he returned his hand into Dean's hair and brought his leg around the younger's, holding him tight against his body for comfort.  
"Tomorrow, when you're awake."

"If I am. If I sleep for a week..."

"Then I'll do it next week."  
  
Dean could barely hear the response, or himself muttering that Castiel had better stay there the whole time with him regardless of if he was going to wake up anytime soon. He didn't wake up to the white light of the lamp either - the angel had to have turned it off to give him more time to rest undisturbed, as it wouldn't have taken long for it to turn on after they'd finished, perhaps no more than an hour.  
Sleeping alone seemed to reduce the quality of rest for Dean, so when he finally did wake up, still safe and close to the older with his arm around the other's body and Castiel's over his in turn, he wasn't surprised he felt like he'd slept better than in a long while. His fingers escaped to play with the angel's stubble and pressed over his lips, moving up until he was brushing the bridge of the other's nose, at which point Castiel's stare made him stop with a muffled laugh.

"Morning."

"Good morning, Dean. You're unusually affectionate."

"Mm-hmm. Maybe. Maybe I missed you."

"I missed you as well."  
There was a hint of cold in Castiel's voice - not the usual sort of coldness, the kind of emotional distance, but more like that of an approaching autumn, something melancholic and lingering. Frost over still warm waters, the finest of cracks spreading across the paper-thin layer of ice. Dean turned to look at him, eyes still heavy from sleep but alert as he sought for answers as if hoping they were carved upon the angel's unchanging features. Castiel looked back at Dean and examined him while Dean simply watched him - the other's blue eyes traced his face like it was an open book, and his own were stuck upon them without finding any of the things he was trying to uncover.

"Is everything okay, Cas?" he asked carefully, worried.

"Their eyes are not upon me now," Castiel replied with a heavy sigh, "but only because they have found another. A girl barely two years old, protected by her parents; neither is an angel, and I do not know her story. If they do, they aren't telling me - I'd image the reason for that is plain. The couple is holding the baby safe by the same means we are protecting ours, but... there are ways. There will always be ways. And they are not fighters, just another family unprepared to deal with the wrath of an angel, let alone more than one at once."  
He glanced at Dean before turning to watch the ceiling instead.  
"Briefly put, they are unprepared for the needs of their child all the same. We have to push Anna harder. I'm sorry, Dean, but I see no other way." 

Dean closed his eyes and drew breath. Instead of replying he sat up and reached for his clothes - after putting on a shirt and a pair of boxers, he stood up and cast a look at the angel.  
"Don't apologise to me," he said with half a shrug, "We both should apologise to her instead. It's our fault she's in this mess. Our fault she... is. And I'm going to take a shower and just - just think." 

Castiel had sat up as well. He nodded.  
"I'll take care of the mess and get the day started," he said with a worn smile. 

Dean nodded in turn.  
"Thanks."

 

* * *

 

When summer broke for autumn, Anna was losing the little child's plumpness in favour of growing some leg and arm instead. She grew so fast Dean felt like her clothes had not gotten small, they had shrank practically overnight, and no matter how many times everything got replaced, it was always too small the day after. Everything she overgrew was put aside for Grace, who was now a happy companion for Anna even though she couldn't keep up with her at all. The baby was trying to talk, too, and watching her gave Dean an odd sense of melancholy that he hadn't expected for another ten years at least, as if Anna as she was wasn't causing him enough headache.

"Maybe we should, you know, have another," Dean chuckled one evening when Castiel had pestered him into sharing what kept him so uneasy.   
The response was a silent, long stare that caused the younger to go through his whole repertoire of facial expressions in a failed attempt to get some life into the interaction.   
"Okay, _fine_ ," he muttered at last, completely defeated by the look. 

As the dry, hot summer had promised, the bend towards winter was anything but. From September on, the weather was chilly and wet, and no matter what day and time it was, it always seemed to be raining or beginning to rain. When the rain stopped remained a mystery for Dean, as he'd never been there to witness such a miracle - when he left to buy groceries, it was raining. When he got out of the shop, it was starting to rain again. When he took a walk with Anna, it was drizzling. When they couldn't see the bunker anymore, the drops got heavy and multiplied until a holy flood was headed for them in the form of a downpour. That was the whole season, with no relief to be seen at the dark horizon.

From breakfast to supper, Anna wanted to try everything her parents were having - she liked fish and had a seemingly unsatiable hunger for the meatballs Kevin occasionally made, but on the much longer list of things she couldn't stand were porridge, mango and, quite unfittingly for her company, coffee. Dean still couldn't shake the face she'd made when she'd reached for his cup and tried the bitter black liquid inside: she'd looked like she'd tried to swallow battery juice, and had frantically - theatrically - filled her mouth with cereals and milk until her cup was empty before announcing that she did not understand why they drank that "foul drink".  
Instead, she immediately took a liking to Jen's peppermint tea. Dean wasn't surprised, not really, given that it contained honey and milk in near equal amounts, but he was glad for the discovery, as the tea was made of herbs that were relaxing and calming. It naturally followed that she often had it over the evening to quiet down and get ready for bed: as much as coffee was a ritual for Dean in the mornings, peppermint tea with too much honey and milk was the bedtime ritual for Anna. 

After the beginning of July, Castiel was still more gone than present. He spent long spans of time in Heaven and elsewhere on Earth alike, and sometimes when Dean settled in their bed alone and ended up lying there for an hour or more before sleep finally came to him, he wished he could have clipped the angel's wings to make him more manageable. It wasn't the first time he entertained such thoughts - it seemed to be an inconvenient reoccurring theme in their relationship he simply couldn't shake, beginning from the very time they'd first started associating. Castiel, it seemed, was by nature a being that would more often be missing than not. It was nearly poetic for an angel and seemed to represent the state of world itself, like a metaphor for all those that prayed for angels and got no angels to ease their suffering.

Even though Dean had dealt with angels for years, he still wasn't entirely certain what their purpose in the order of creation was. They seemed to be soldiers for a war that would never be fought: a band of frustrated barbarians with the lead of their army all but missing, endlessly waiting for the uneasy truce to be over once and for all. And Castiel, in all that he was different, was still one of them at heart. He had his grand purposes, his unspoken _raison d'être_ s that kept him on the road but unseen more often than within reach.  
Despite once more having proved how damaging the lack of communication could be, he didn't seem all too willing to share what was going on up there. His eagerness to explain had thus far been limited to knowledge of the activity he followed spreading into Dean's realm, as if Dean had been the king of humanity and had all of the realms of men under his command. With threats such as this, he couldn't shake the feeling that perhaps he was. Perhaps this all was butthe weight of his crown, the one he'd never asked to bear but could find no other head that would be strong enough to wear it. Whenever it came to that, he discussed the situation with Sam and decided not to act. Getting hunters involved where not only angels were warring but they would end up against nephilim seemed like a waste of good men. And yet, none of it was right. Not acting, acting. All of it was wrong. Dean knew it when he watched his girl grow up and learn to ride a bike - he knew it when she came to him screaming and crying because she had no friends to play with, and Henry was out there again with someone, somewhere, and _why, dad, why._ And Dean simply had no answer for her, because he, much like her, lacked the proper picture. The only thing he could say was that it was for her safety - _for_ her, to keep her alive.  
And day by day he felt that he was a little bit more like his own father had been, becoming once more the man he'd promised he'd never be to his children, no matter what.

 

* * *

 

**Fifth year**

"I can't see her today," Castiel spoke quietly and surprised. 

"What?" Dean asked dully from over his cup of coffee, unable to decipher a contextless announcement such as that so early in the morning. 

"I can't see her aura. She's - she's not _Anna_ the way I've known her her whole life. She's... normal." 

The younger nearly choked to his sandwich. He turned to watch the girl hop on the chair opposite of them (clearly, their paranoia had not yet rubbed onto her) and flashed them both a prideful, almost angry stare before reaching for the toast and butter in the middle.  
"Dad," she started in a voice that perfectly matched the manner she carried herself that day, "Is it Christmas yet?" 

Dean exchanged looks with Castiel.  
"No," he said baffledly then, "You should know - you're the one with the calendar. What day is it?" 

"16th."

"And what day is Christmas day again?" 

"25th." 

"Yeah," Dean confirmed, "so it's not Christmas yet. Anna, uh, is there something you want to tell -" 

"No." 

"Okay." 

It was Castiel's turn to exchange looks with Dean - he had toast half-way to his mouth, and Dean felt like the sight of that was perhaps as strange as seeing Anna so out of character.  
  
'Should I sprinkle holy water on her?' he mouthed slowly to the angel next to him.

Castiel suppressed a smile and shook his head. He made the oft-used Winchester sign for _clear of possession_. 

"What are you whispering?" Anna asked, staring intently at them as if having expected such a silent conversation. 

"Just, uh, we think you're keeping secrets. That's all." 

"Maybe."  
She was so proud of it.  
"Katie knows."

By this time, she was more than perfectly able to pronounce Castiel correctly - the sole reason she refused to do so was the fact that Katie amused Dean so much. Even now, despite curiosity holding the vast majority of his concentration, he still snorted at the name.

"Do I?" Castiel asked, tilting his head and squinting at the girl, but his expression was far from the usual inquisitive one and clearly he was more just playing along. 

"Mm-hmm. It's about that thiiing." 

"What thing?" Dean asked, mouth full of toast.

Castiel was still holding his half-eaten one, so when Dean ran out, he reached for the angel's instead. It was easy to slip out of his grasp, but unlike Dean had expected, the male reached near immediately to make himself a new one. Apparently he'd recently grown fond of toasts on a whole new level of appreciation. 

"That _thing_..." Anna continued, and her prideful attitude towards the matter had fallen apart to the excitement that boiled inside. 

"The aura thing?" Dean helped, grimacing.

"Maybe. Cassie." 

Castiel looked at her and was now clearly holding back a smile.  
"Now that you said it," he spoke in a voice of amazement, "I can't seem to find - are you sure you are Anna?"

"Yeeeeah," Anna replied, bursting into a smile and suppressing a giggle, "Yeah. Yeah. I got it. Last night. And I held until morning. It's reeeally easy, I don't know how I didn't get it before now~" 

Her near-singing tone made Dean breathe coffee up his nose. He sniffed uncomfortably and swallowed a bit of toast to keep the slime from gathering up in his throat as a result of the strayed mouthful. Nobody seemed to notice anything out of the usual. 

"So..."  
Anna's face fell from the smile to a very scared, very shy expression.  
"Can I... can I play with Rose now?" 

Dean felt the fine hair rising on his neck and the backs of his arms, and the thick t-shirt he was wearing didn't offer much protection against the sudden chill. Castiel's hand brushed against his on its way to the ear of his mug and they shared a brief eye contact. The angel nodded ever so subtly, and Dean felt almost as relieved as Anna would once she'd hear her nearly year-long grounding had finally ended.  
"You can," he announced, as despite her keen eye, she clearly hadn't been certain yet. 

The scream of joy she let out made Dean raise his brows and instinctively draw back in his chair, one hand lifting half-way up to covering his ear. Anna slipped off her chair and continued screaming until she was out of sight.  
"Come back to eat your breakfast!" Dean shouted after her, already knowing she would _not_ be back for a good while. 

"She's probably going to jump on her bed," Castiel noted. 

"And it's going to be creaking a hell of a lot more than earlier after that." 

"Probably." 

They continued the breakfast in a tense silence.  
"Cas..." Dean finally started, laying down his cup and turning towards the male in his chair.  
  
Castiel nodded.   
"We have to be extremely careful. She needs to remember - the moment she sees an angel - and she has to stay alert. I don't think she understands at all what kind of a danger she is in." 

Dean shook his head.  
"She doesn't," he said sadly, "How the hell could she?"  
His fingers reached to play with the hem of Castiel's white collared shirt that loosely rested upon his lap over the black pants, both of which he'd worn for years and years, if not all that often without the rest of the outfit and in such a relaxed, homely manner.  
"If only Charlie could figure out how to convert the damn angel tracking system to a smaller device, like an EMF, that I could fix up - I'd feel a ton safer going out with her again. But... she needs it. She really, really needs it. She's so bored and tense on her own. She needs company, Cas. What the hell can I do but let her out?" 

Castiel shrugged.  
"She needs to learn," he said after a while, "The earlier the better. The more used to it she will be. And we'll be there to protect her. Dean, if anything happens -" 

"I know," Dean grunted, "I'll let you know. And you promised -" 

"I promised I would only take her to safety."

"Not fight." 

"Not fight." 

"Not die." 

Castiel smiled.  
"Not die." 

"Good," Dean sighed and turned back to poke at his coffee mug.  
He raised his eyes to search the room, unable to shake the worry from under his skin, but at the same time, it was accompanied by a strange kind of relief. The wait was over. Now the only thing left was the real life test. And she would pass - there was no way in hell they'd let anything bad happen to her. Once she would be older, she'd be able to protect herself, and she'd be a Letter herself, she would have them all to back her up. By that time, the few initiates they'd gathered and that Sam, Dean and Kevin had all approved and began training to one day join their ranks would also be ready - they'd be many more than they were now. On top of that, Charlie was in the process of improving the impressive alarm system of not only the bunker itself but the whole surrounding area of it and joining it up to a digital center that would be easier to control than the current manual system was. The bunker was and would be the safest place in the States and perhaps the whole world for a nephil to reside in. Anna couldn't have been warded better against the purification efforts - which reminded Dean of a topic that had bothered him for a while now.

His jaw tensed and he stopped tapping the porcelain mug with the back of his nail, and the sudden silence alarmed Castiel from quietly chewing on his toast, which he promptly laid back on the plate in front of him to turn and look at Dean instead.

"Cas," the younger started after a moment of silence, "Why did you - why did you give her to me in the first place?"

The angel frowned.  
"What do you mean?" he asked. 

Dean shrugged.  
"Remember when I reorganized the notes last year?" 

"Yes, I do."

"Well - uh - I started thinking, Cas, the way I behaved - before Anna - it wasn't exactly, you know, healthy. Like, in any... any way, from any point of view. And I sure as hell wasn't parent material. I was - I don't know, man. Weird. And the way I..."  
He'd never spoken of it before. He'd buried it so deep that now that he was trying, he couldn't quite _find_ the things he wanted to talk about. They weren't six feet under, they were _sixty_ feet under and encased in concrete.  
"The way I got her vessel, Cas. You didn't give me any - goddamnit. You know what I mean. You didn't want it. So why did you do it? Why, when I basically screwed every damn rule in the book and - and just didn't listen to what you needed and wanted because I was so fucking full of myself - why did you give in?" 

Castiel's tongue visited briefly the surface of his lower lip and he drew breath, frowned again and then leaned back in his chair. He lifted a leg over the other, rested his elbow on the backrest of his chair and turned most of his body towards Dean, although his eyes were looking at the ceiling and sweeping the (dusty and definitely in need of some non-figurative sweeping) bookshelves in the room.  
"I don't know," he said finally, turning to look Dean in the eye, "No - I do, but it's very difficult to explain." 

"Try me, Cas, because I'm dying to know." 

"Mm."  
The male sought reassurance from the ceiling again but Dean kept looking at him.  
"I suppose I wanted it - needed it as badly as you did. The difference... is where our needs lie, Dean. You, as a human... you needed her, you needed what your biology regards as the fulfillment of your life. Basic reproduction together with the social desire of raising a family. That is a powerful urge for any of your kind and if I'm completely honest, I was never surprised that when it came, it came that way. There was a lot of fear in you, Dean. You'd already decided it was something you'd never have, and you were hurting. I've noticed you tend to overreact under those circumstances." 

Dean was staring at the table. He couldn't quite face Castiel when he was once again reducing him to his basic biology and shattered remains of mental health, but on the other hand, he'd asked for it, or at least he'd been prepared to listen if it helped the other get to the answers he'd actually asked for.  
  
"'Overreact' is a bit of an understatement, Cas," he noted after a moment. 

"We both know what I mean. As for myself, my instincts tell me to first and foremost listen to the Word and the Will. No matter what other desires I had, they were always fighting with what I was created for, and as much as I've learned about controlling that base desire, it is still very strong in me, because that is what angels are. I can't explain to you what the need to have Anna with you was like, because it's one of those things that do not come naturally to me. It's... something that is not native to my species, and I've always had trouble explaining how and what I feel when I feel it; I haven't to date quite figured out how I should go about those feelings, especially as they more often than not are in direct conflict with what I am as an angel."  
The older let out a thoughtful, long breath and then shrugged, giving Dean a small smile before continuing.  
"I suppose whatever madness was in you was just as much in me, and in the end, when it was done, despite how angry I was at myself for allowing it to happen, I... I was relieved. I was happy you'd made that choice - that you'd dirtied your hands so that I could keep my conscience clean and pretend to be angry at you for as long as it took me to come to terms what we had together gotten into. I'm sorry I couldn't support you then, Dean, but... I was confused and scared."

Dean nodded slowly. As unsatisfying as it was as an answer, the revelation did make him feel an intense sort of relief - and a whole lot better about the whole thing. The hurt that covered Anna's past seemed to fade fast to all of what he'd heard now, to the knowledge that through it all, he'd been nothing but a partner in crime, not a culprit.

"Another funny thing," Dean said in a moment's time, grinning, "is that you suddenly stopped calling it corruption around the midway point and started calling it an angelic pregnancy instead. That was really cute and really goddamn disturbing, and not least because you're a dude." 

Castiel laughed.  
"That," he said with a hint of longing in his voice, "would be the point at which I came to terms with what we were doing."


	13. Epilogue

* * *

 

 

Castiel's sword reflected the light of the sun as he raised it in defense against the one that Anna brought towards him. Her movements were much faster than his, but she was inexperienced and rough where he was contained, calm and calculative. Dust danced around their feet as they regained footing - in a moment's time, before the dry sand had had the chance to settle, the angel pushed her off balance and she fell back, stumbled but did not fall.  
Her eyes flashed, light charging through her and engulfed the blade she held, and with it raised in attack she charged forth again. The collision of the enchanted weapon with the manifestation of Castiel's grace caused a tremor that seemed to run through his form like an earthquake through a metal frame, reaching up to the ground and bending the grass like a blast of wind. Small sticks, stones and dirt flew from the point of contact and scattered soundly wherever the wave carried them.

The angel seemed taken aback, even afraid, as he realised he'd lost his footing. Unlike Anna had so easily done, he couldn't regain balance - the impact was too hard on him, threw him back and through the air until he landed heavily on the dried ground, hair covered in dust and breath taken by the hard landing.  
The nephil didn't bother with speed. She walked over to him and pressed her blade against his throat, looking him deep in the eyes with a wavering, calculating smile on her.  
Despite the fact that Castiel's blade was pressing against her stomach, they both knew who'd won - the older was still shivering and the power the young woman had used against him had all but blocked the flow of power from his grace to the hand of his vessel's, and the pain he felt was real and his body couldn't even draw breath as it attempted to recover from the shock delivered by the attack. From his expression it was clear that he had no idea what had just hit him, but his defeat was clear and he accepted it with certain decisive contentment. They'd always known there'd be a time when Anna would be stronger than he was: that one day, she'd be trained and capable. They'd brought her here, and as the cold grace of a dead angel pressed sharp and merciless against his skin, Castiel couldn't help but smile.  
Breath, now finally released, came out as a quiet, almost relieved sigh. He pressed his elbows into the dry grass, coat spread around his body like the figure of a snow angel in the middle of a summer's heat, and he let his blade fall to the ground.

Anna's smile changed as he reached his hand over hers, fingers caressing her freckled, soft skin. She brushed aside her long, thick curls, adjusted them behind her ear and let the blade slip from Castiel's throat. With a trained movement she pushed it back on her belt - Castiel's had retreated into his form again and was nowhere to be found - and with her free hand she grabbed a firm hold of the male and pulled him up.

Dean smiled at them, unable to hold back the pain that he felt alongside with pride and affection both. This was his little girl, no more than a few inches below him, fully grown and a hurricane in human form - a wildfire contained by his skin turned hers and carefully managed by the grace given to her by the angel she'd bested.  
He didn't have words. They'd known, of course they'd known. But he still wasn't ready - _he_ wasn't ready - and despite the fact her initiation was over and she'd be a full Woman of Letters by the end of the day, despite the fact that he'd helped make the preparations and was all up for the party that'd follow, this was _his girl_  all grown up, all ready to face the world on her own, and what the hell was he?

Castiel patted dust from his coat; Dean had missed the words he'd spoken to Anna, but the manner she held her hand over her mouth spoke of the weight of the message. She held back her tears and laughed instead - she was very good at that.  
The angel parted from her side and walked over to Dean.

"I used to consider myself a skillful soldier," he spoke with a hint of a smile on him, the back of his palm brushing against Dean's stubbled cheek, "Now I can't seem to find a way through the fight anymore."

Dean grimaced and shook his head, glancing over at Anna packing up her things.  
"If it makes you feel any better," he chuckled wornly, "I'm 56 and I can't best either of you. So trust me, Cas... I know how you feel."

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so who's up for a sequel from Castiel's PoV? 8D


End file.
